Shinjuku as site: Funeral Parade of

Roses and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief

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TA RO N E T T L E T O N

There is no site more appropriate for considering Japanese underground art

of the 1960s than Shinjuku, a ward located in the geographical centre of
Tokyo. Today Shinjuku is Tokyo’s civic, commercial and entertainment
centre; it is home to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building, the
world’s busiest train station, five major department stores, countless bars
and nightclubs, and Japan’s most famous gay district. Its establishment as
Japan’s leading business and entertainment district was a process that
started in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1971 the opening of the Keio
Plaza Hotel on the western side of Shinjuku Station inaugurated the mass
commercial development and architectural transformation of the area, with
the construction of numerous skyscrapers and department stores. This led to
Shinjuku being known as fukutoshin, or the ‘sub capital’ of Tokyo; with its
jazz cafes, go-go clubs and underground theatre and film venues, it also
became recognized as a home to members of various subcultures, ranging
from leftwing radical activists to fūten, or non-political hippies (who, unlike
their US counterparts, rose in popularity from the latter half of the 1960s to
the early 1970s). Kara Jurō, playwright and director of the Situationist
Theatre, set up his Red Tent on the grounds of the Hanazono Shrine in
Shinjuku in 1967.
The art collective Zero Jigen, arguably one of the most important such
groups of the period, staged ‘happenings’ on the streets of Shinjuku. The
Shinjuku Art Theatre, the official venue of the Art Theatre Guild (ATG),
opened in 1962 as Japan’s first arthouse cinema and equivalent to an off-
Broadway stage, while in 1967 Underground Sasoriza opened in the
basement of the same building to show underground films. Between 1967

5 Screen 55:1 Spring 2014

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
doi:10.1093/screen/hju001

1 This essay follows the Japanese
convention for placing family name
before given name, except where a
particular referenced publication
presents this differently.
2 ‘Anpo no suteishi: hodou no
shikiishi oharaibako’ (‘Paving
stones cast aside in sacrifice for
Japan–US security treaty’), Asahi
Shimbun, Tokyo morning edition, 24
February 1969, p. 16.
3 Sekine Hiroshi, Waga Shinjuku!
Hangyaku suru machi (Our
Shinjuku! The City that Revolts)
(Tokyo: Zaikaitenboshinsha, 1969),
p. 1.
and 1979, the ATG supported independent film production teams by
supplying fifty per cent of production costs to create a series of what were
called ‘ten million yen movies’. In doing so it provided the primary means
by which ambitious young directors could produce films outside of the
usual five-studio system (Daiei, Nikkatsu, Shōchiku, Toei and Tohō). In this
essay I consider two such ‘ten million yen movies’ set in Shinjuku: Shinjuku
dorobō nikki/Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Ōshima Nagisa, 1969) and Bara no
sōretsu/Funeral Parade of Roses (Matsumoto Toshio, 1969) (hereafter
Diary and Funeral, respectively).1 By analyzing the relation between space,
subjects and politics in these two films, I explore how differently the two
films envisioned ‘Shinjuku’, in terms of who qualified as the city’s rightful
citizens and what ‘politics’ meant there at the time.
In its relentless representation of Shinjuku both textually and visually, the
mass media of the period consistently transformed any avant-garde
tendencies into toothless pop-cultural phenomena. One such example was
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the ‘happening’, which was introduced to Japan by New York-affiliated
visual artists and composers such as Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg and
John Cage, who performed at Sogestu Hall between 1962 and 1964, while it
was under the direction of the film director Teshigahara Hiroshi. As media
coverage of happenings exploded, the new genre’s meaning shifted from
designating a form of art to a vague definition of any phenomenon from
festivals and parties to orgies and political demonstrations. An article from a
February 1969 edition of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper best expresses this
confusion over what a happening might be, and describes the transformation
of public space carried out to contain all the divergent acts it could refer to. It
reported that Police Headquarters had formally requested, in anticipation of
protests against the 1970 renewal of the Japan–USA security treaty, that all
cobblestone streets in Tokyo be paved over with asphalt to prevent rioters
from using the paving stones as weapons: ‘As 1970 approaches, increased
rioting by students is expected and one never knows when or where a
happening [hapuningu] may occur. The Police Headquarters requested that
areas similar to Shinjuku, where happenings are likely to occur, be paved
first.’2 Although ‘one never knows when or where a happening may occur’,
it was apparently most likely to happen in Shinjuku.
What would make an area ‘similar to Shinjuku’? In 1969 the critic Sekine
Hiroshi characterized Shinjuku by contrasting it with the classier district of
Ginza: ‘If Ginza is the main street, Shinjuku is its back alley. If Ginza is first
rate, Shinjuku is second rate. It is, however, a first-rate second-rate
neighbourhood.’3 Okamedo Yasunori, best known as the publisher of
Uwasa no shinsō (The Truth Behind the Rumours), a controversial gossip
magazine that addressed taboo topics that no other publications would
touch, described his impression of Shinjuku upon his 1966 arrival from
Kyushu thus:
From when I first arrived at the Shinjuku East Exit Plaza and walked
through the bustle to Kabukichō, it felt as if even a person from the outer
prefectures, like myself, could fit in there. It [Shinjuku] was neither as
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4 Okamedo Yasunori, quoted in
Nanba Koji, Zoku no keifugaku:
youth subculture no sengoshi (The
Genealogy of Tribes: a Postwar
History of Youth Subcultures)
(Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2007), p. 146.
5 Ibid., p. 155.
6 Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville
(Paris: Anthropos, 1968).
7 Michel de Certeau, Practice of
Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press,
1984), p. 117.
8 Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Reasonable
urbanism’, in Joan Copjec and
Michael Sorkin (eds), Giving
Ground: the Politics of Propinquity
(New York, NY: Verso, 1999), p. 178.
fashionable nor as beautiful as Roppongi or Ginza, but it looked like a city
equipped with an enormous absorption mechanism that would accept
anything – country bumpkins, outlaws, yakuza, fūten, beggars,
homosexuals, prostitutes.4
Such associations were likely to have influenced Matsumoto’s and
Ōshima’s decision to reference Jean Genet and the close relation between
seediness, danger and excitement that his works articulated. While it may
have been a place where anything was acceptable, Okamedo remembers
Shinjuku most vividly as a home for countercultural practices:
On 8 August [1966], a freight train carrying gasoline for US military
planes crashed and burned inside Shinjuku station. Amidst such turbulent
situations, with stage devices such as jazz cafes, ankoku butoh, avant-
garde art and underground film, Shinjuku (East Exit) shaped up to
become the epicentre of the counterculture.5
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Shinjuku was also becoming a site of intense contestation. As more and
more young people asserted their ‘right to the city’, the title of Henri
Lefebvre’s book first published in Japanese translation in 1969,6 those with
private economic interests in the neighbourhood fought to protect what they
saw as their rightful property from the area’s younger, transient occupants.
In addition to paving the streets of Tokyo virtually overnight, another
landmark incident in terms of spatiopolitical antagonism involved the
renaming of a semipublic space in Shinjuku station. During the summer of
1969, young folk musicians gathered every Saturday inside one of the
station’s passages. On 28 June, around 7000 young people had gathered for
a ‘folk song meeting’ when riot police intervened, shooting at the unarmed
young people with approximately one hundred rounds of tear gas and
making sixty-four arrests. Soon after this incident, the underground passage
that had been temporarily appropriated and occupied for these meetings had
its name changed, from ‘West Exit Underground Plaza’ to ‘West Exit
Underground Passage’, in an attempt to discourage unsanctioned use of the
space. This renaming was clearly an attempt to redefine the space from a
social one, that people could temporarily inhabit, to a strictly transitional
one, that people were allowed only to pass through. Michel de Certeau’s
distinction between ‘places’ and ‘spaces’ is useful in considering this
change. For de Certeau, a place is designed, stable and univocal. People
transform ‘places’ into ‘spaces’, which are polyvalent and polysemic, by
putting them to use and bringing them into play.7
A ‘plaza’ can be used in multiple ways while a ‘passage’ can only be
walked through, so in this sense the authorities were determined to designate
West Exit Passage as a place. Its renaming, however, unintentionally
exposed the fact that, as Rosalyn Deutsche has explained in another context,
spaces are used to support ‘existing power relations by endowing [them]
with proper uses that seem dictated by natural or objective truths’.8 As long
as it was a passage, its only ‘natural’ use would be to pass through it. Altering
the name of a place to naturalize the use of it only works, however, to show
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7
Fig. 1 Bara no sōretsu/Funeral
Parade of Roses (Toshio
Matsumoto, 1969).
9 Kogawa Tetsuo, Toshi no tsukaikata
(How to Use the City) (Tokyo:
Kōbundo, 1989), p. 49.
10 Kogawa Tetsuo, Space wo ikuru
shisō (Philosophy for Living
Spatially) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo,
1987), pp. 55–56.
11 Oshima Nagisa, Cinema,
Censorship and the State: the
Writings of Oshima Nagisa,
1956–78, ed. Annette Michelson,
trans. Dawn Lawson (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 235.
12 Watanabe Shinya, ‘Ano Shinjuku e
no jerashii’ (‘Jealousy for that
Shinjuku’), Studio Voice, September
1998, p. 54.
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that space produces, and is produced within, relations of power. The
transformation was also symbolized by a larger shift, extending well outside
the station, in which traffic laws were growing increasingly strict. As critic
and performance artist Kogawa Tetsuo points out, ‘Japanese traffic laws, if
strictly followed, prohibit street performances’. In Japan, the ‘public streets
belong to the government rather than its citizens’.9 Moreover, Kogawa
notes, ‘The end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s also saw an
increased presence of plain-clothed police in the alleys’.10 Ironically, as
Ōshima wrote in an essay in 1971, a year after the West Exit incident, ‘the
governor and the chief commissioner of the metropolitan police imitate[d]
the philosophy of hippies and drifters’ and established a ‘pedestrian’s
heaven’,11 in which streets are blocked off from traffic to allow pedestrians
to walk freely, and for people to dance, play music, and so on in the street. As
if to underscore Sekine’s contrasting of Shinjuku with the more upmarket
Ginza, it was the latter where the first ‘pedestrian’s heaven’ was
implemented. While Kogawa’s assessment that the streets in Tokyo did not
belong to the people may have been true, Ōshima’s statement shows that
spatial politics are rarely articulated by simple, unidirectional repression.
Shinjuku of the 1960s and 1970s has frequently been painted as a utopia:
when a 1998 issue of the subculture magazine Studio Voice ran a feature
called ‘Shinjuku Jack 1968’, with a still from Funeral on its cover, one
writer penned an essay unabashedly admitting to ‘jealousy for that
Shinjuku’, identifying the connections between the student movement and
underground theatre as the origins of a ‘Shinjuku culture’, the vitality of
which, he argued, can never be attained again.12 Far from simply being a
zone of unfettered freedoms, however, it was a space of complex power
negotiations, simultaneously a stage for numerous countercultural actions
and an increasingly regulated space developed for commercial profit. Diary
serves, in part, as a portrait of Shinjuku and a document of the
countercultural tendencies of the period. It loosely follows the sexual
problems of a book thief named ‘Birdie Hilltop’, played by the famed
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8
Fig. 2 Funeral Parade of Roses.
13 Tadanori Yokoo, Yokoo Tadanori
jiden (Tokyo: Bungei Shunju, 1995),
p. 170.
14 Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer
(Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1979), p. 356.
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graphic-designer-turned-painter Tadanori Yokoo, and ‘Suzuki Umeko’, a
girl who pretends to work at Kinokuniya bookstore, played by the actress
and, latterly, Shinjuku bar proprietor Yokoyama Rie. Yokoo comments on
his experience of Diary in his autobiography: ‘It’s true that I appear
frequently in it, but I started to feel that there was another protagonist – a
non-human protagonist, for example, the city of Shinjuku, the 1960s, or the
film medium itself’.13 Shinjuku is equally a character in Funeral, the first
feature-length film by Matsumoto Toshio, an experimental and
documentary filmmaker and one of the period’s most lucid art and film
critics. Funeral is a modern-day version of Oedipus Rex, featuring Eddy, a
transvestite played by the beautiful young Peter in his debut role (Peter
would go on to star in Ran [Kurosawa Akira, 1985]), and Gonda, the owner
of a transvestite bar called Genet in the Ni-chōme district of Shinjuku, at
which Eddy works. Although well known in Japan, and mentioned in major
Japanese film studies texts such as Noël Burch’s To the Distant Observer, in
which Matsumoto is awkwardly characterized as ‘not a primitive, but an
avowed disciple of Brecht’,14 to date the majority of his films have had no
official overseas release in the USA (though Funeral is available in the UK).
In the broadest terms, the city symphony is a film that portrays the life of a
city from morning to night. In this sense Funeral and Diary might be
considered late examples of the genre, albeit with several key distinctions.
While canonical city symphonies tend to privilege triumphant, panoramic
views of the urban landscape, Funeral begins by showing a couple making
love. The camera captures their movements – hands grasping at a back, lips
kissing, a face buried in the crevice beneath the ribs – in shots alternately
closeup and so extremely closeup as to render the mise-en-scene abstract.
The scale in this sequence is so skewed, in fact, that the bodies begin to
resemble landscapes (figure 1). Overexposed to the point of being nearly
white, the sequence ends with a closeup shot of Eddy, the young transvestite
from the drag bar Genet, in rapture as his older lover, Gonda, kisses his neck
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9
Fig. 3 Shinjuku dorobō nikki/Diary
of a Shinjuku Thief (Ōshima Nagisa,
1969).
15 Juan Suarez, ‘City space,
technology, popular culture: the
modernism of Paul Strand and
Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta’,
Journal of American Studies,
vol. 36, no. 1 (2002), pp. 85, 104.
16 Ōshima Nagisa, ‘Shinario ni tsuite’
(‘Regarding the scenario’), Art
Theater, no. 65 (1969), p. 20.
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(figure 2). Unlike a typical city symphony, by opening with images of a
sexually intimate act, Funeral focuses on rather than omits ‘the multiplicity
of the human landscape’, as Juan Suarez argues is the case with Manhatta
(Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, 1921), one of the most significant city
symphonies and the first important American avant-garde film.15 Not only
does Funeral focus on the human landscape, as it were, it also shows, in the
following scene in Gonda’s car, that subjectivity is inextricably tied to the
social space of the city. In a shot which tightly frames the rearview mirror so
that it takes up the centre third of the frame, Eddy’s eyes, which are reflected
in the mirror, are sandwiched by the overexposed receding cityscape behind
them. Showing Eddy in a moment of uneasy silence, the shot suggests that
he will be defined through his relation to the city as well as to other people.
The city symphony usually lacks a narrative, instead unfolding in a linear
manner, emphasizing the passage of time in a typical day. Funeral – as a
modern-day retelling of Oedipus Rex – has arguably the most classic of
narratives. Despite this, the film is so trenchantly nonlinear that piecing
together the different scenes in a coherent timeline is all but impossible upon
initial viewing. In addition to the flashbacks to Eddy’s teenage years, scenes
constituting the primary sequence of events are started, interrupted and
resumed at a later point without explanation. Diary, on the other hand, is
fairly straightforward in terms of its sequencing of events. Although
Ōshima has explained that he began shooting film with an incomplete script
out of a desire to ‘collide fiction and documentary … and incorporate as
many indeterminate elements as possible to create an alternate reality’,16 the
temporal logic of the film is quite linear. In fact the film opens with intertitles
reading ‘Greenwich Standard Time 3:00; New York 22:00; Paris 4:00 …
Japan Standard Time 12:00’, and obsessively marks the passage of narrative
time with further periodic use of similar intertitles throughout the film
(figure 3).
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17 Scott MacDonald, The Garden in
the Machine: a Field Guide to
Independent Films About
Place (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2001), p. 171.
MacDonald draws a parallel
between the literal and
metaphorical ‘fireworks’ that end
Berlin and Spike Lee’s Do the Right
Thing (1989), respectively.
18 Michael Warner, Publics and
Counterpublics (New York, NY:
Zone Books, 2002), p. 205. Warner
is drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s
essay, ‘Le Droit a la ville’. See Henri
Lefebvre, ‘The right to the city’, in
Writings on Cities, ed. and trans.
Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth
Lebas (Cambridge: Blackwell,
1996), pp. 147–59.
Whereas the opening sequence of Funeral sets the tone for the rest of the
film by framing sexual perversion as a given, Diary views sexual perversion
as something to be corrected. The pleasure that Birdie obtains from stealing,
which the film relates to his and Umeko’s inability to satisfactorily perform
intercourse, is treated clinically throughout the course of the film. Birdie and
Umeko eventually manage to connect physically and emotionally with the
help of a renowned sexologist, Ōshima’s regular crew of actors and Kara
Jurō. The film thus ends with a twofold climax, in which a riot, concluding
with a stone thrown through a police station window, is juxtaposed with an
image of the couple finally achieving satisfaction from their lovemaking.
Diary ends, then, like Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grosstadt/Berlin: Symphony
of a Great City (Walter Ruttman, 1927) and other city symphonies that
followed, with ‘fireworks’.17
Just as Diary ends with the first ‘successful’ sexual act between its
protagonists Birdie Hilltop and Suzuki Umeko, Funeral opens with Eddy
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and Gonda making love in a hotel in Nishi Ōkubo, a neighbourhood
adjacent to the west side of Shinjuku. We surmise from their conversation
that the sun is just beginning to rise. Gonda opens the curtains, letting some
light into the room and remarking, ‘It’s a nice day’. In the next scene, as the
couple walk out of the hotel, a hearse passes by, as if to contradict Gonda’s
reaction to the sunlight that had filled the languid ambience of their recently
vacated room. After the pair drive away from the hotel, the film shows the
Shinjuku East Exit plaza at night. Tilting down from a shot of neon signs, a
veritable synecdoche for the neighbourhood and an obvious symbol of
organized commerce, we are shown a group of young people kicking an
inflatable chair back and forth, engaged in, as far as business is concerned,
non-productive activity.
The emphasis on neon and the aerial view of people in the plaza, which
renders them as dots on the ground, recall typical shots from a city
symphony film. The camera closes in on the figures, however, showing
them to be what the script describes as fūten. Watching them is Guevara, a
character later revealed to be an experimental filmmaker. One of the fūten,
Sabu, stamps a black rose on the hand of a passerby. While the significance
of this action goes unexplained, it alludes to the contemporary Japanese
counterculture’s obsession with Genet, to whom both Diary and Funeral
refer, and the tendency of contemporary performance and theatre arts, such
as those of Hi Red Center and Shūji Terayama, to take to the streets,
involving an unsuspecting public as both audience and performers. The
sequence thus suggests that Shinjuku was used as a site for various actions,
both within and outside the film, and that, ‘the right to the city extends to
those who use the city. It is not limited to property owners.’18 It thus
underscores Shinjuku’s presence as space rather than place, in de
Certeaunian terms.
The Ni-chōme area of Shinjuku first burgeoned as a home for gay bars at
around the same time as these two films were produced. As the
neighbourhood became known as a gay district, the majority of the bars – the
type most prominently represented in the Japanese media – were primarily
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19 Matsumoto Toshio, ‘Kizuguchi
to wa’ (‘The wound and the
dagger’), Art Theater,
no. 70 (1969), p. 17.
20 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics, 2nd edn (New York, NY:
Verso, 2001), p. 180.
21 For more on the use of rape imagery,
specifically in Ōshima’s films, see
Maureen Turim, The Films of
Nagisa Oshima: Images of a
Japanese Iconoclast (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press,
1998), esp. pp. 246–68.
staffed with male transvestites who entertained their queer, though not
necessarily homosexual, customers by pouring drinks, flirting, singing,
dancing and sometimes sleeping with them. Genet, the space in which much
of Funeral is set, is one such bar. Matsumoto, who had already made
numerous experimental shorts and documentaries, chose to cast his first
feature-length film with ‘gay boys’, as transvestites were called in 1969,
because he saw them as potentially countercultural figures.
The film opens with a quotation from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal: ‘I
am the wound and the dagger, the victim and executioner’; Matsumoto has
explained his casting decision as follows:
I could not help but see these gay boys, men who could only live as
women, and Eddy, who killed his mother and slept with his father in
particular, as the ‘wounds’ of our times, and simultaneously, and because
of this, as having the existential structure and potential to become a
‘dagger’ against our times.19
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Matsumoto’s characterization of gay boys as ‘wounds’ is pathologizing in a
manner that is contradicted by the actual film. As I argue above, in Funeral
perversion is taken for granted, and the film, unlike Matsumoto’s comment,
characterizes neither queers as symptoms of contemporary sociopolitical
maladies nor heterosexuals as the norm. Moreover, I want to focus on the
film’s articulation of a politics of ‘becoming’, or potentiality, rather than on
Matsumoto’s burdening of queers with political radicalism. As I go on to
explain below, the film shows us that neither politics nor the site of the
political can be predetermined. As such, despite its director’s comment, the
logic of the film actually disavows the possibility of gay boys serving a
defined political cause or agenda.
One way to understand Matsumoto’s characterization of gay boys is to
read it as a rebuttal to his critics. His selection of this site, a gay bar, and its
star employee, a gay boy, as ‘daggers against our times’ was surprising to
many viewers. While political activism had been addressed in numerous
domestic and foreign films of the period, and although sexual liberation was
frequently equated with personal freedom, sexuality had not been widely
understood as a potential ‘surface of emergence of democratic antagonism’,
to use Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s phrase.20 This was particularly
true of the male and heterosexually dominated world of commercial
filmmaking. The setting of Matsumoto’s film immediately positioned itself
in conflict with the work of peers such as Ōshima and Wakamatsu Kōji, who
were and are still seen as among the most politically engaged artists of the
time. In their films, scenes of women being raped were frequently employed
as political allegory, symbolizing the violence required for revolutionary
transformation and a violent backlash against the frustration caused by
political impotence.21 In one scene in Diary, for example, Umeko is raped
by a group of men – Ōshima’s regular crew of actors, who appear ‘as
themselves’ – as Birdie looks on helplessly. Although not presented as an
overt political allegory, the rape clearly stands for something else. Intertitles
reading ‘Umeko was raped by two men’ reiterate what was just shown on the
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22 Matsumoto Toshio, ‘Kizuguchi to
Ha’ (‘What is a scar?’), in Eiga no
kakumei (Revolution in Film) (Tokyo:
Sanichi Shobo, 1972), p. 236.
23 Laclau and Mouffe, ‘Introduction’,
in Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy, p. xviii.
24 Ibid., p. 107.
25 Ibid.
screen, and then ask, ‘And what did Birdie do?’, underscoring his
impotence. What the rape might mean for Umeko, the direct recipient of this
violent act, is never addressed.
In terms of critical reception, if Matsumoto’s aim was to represent these
gay boys as countercultural and politically radical agents, his plan
succeeded only partially, for at the time of its release the film was criticized
precisely for the subjects it depicted. Some detractors, according to
Matsumoto, went so far as to accuse him of evading reality by looking at
these men during a ‘season of intense politics’.22 In what sense might one
consider queer sexuality unreal? In this case, such a perception was made
possible by invoking the classic subjective/objective dichotomy, which
aimed to place homo- and queer sexuality in the former category and,
presumably, Marxist activism in the latter. Sexuality, in other words, was a
private and thus an apolitical matter. If such criticisms had widespread
resonance, it would suggest that Matsumoto’s film was, in fact, politically
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pertinent. If gay boys were not considered a part of reality, then by virtue of
their representation and by giving viewers a reason to believe in the
existence of a queer counterpublic sphere, Funeral was a political film in its
questioning of heteronormative logic.
As an attempt to separate so-called ‘real politics’ from the ‘merely
private’, the criticism Matsumoto received recalls one that Laclau and
Mouffe identify, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, as becoming popular
among the Left: ‘It is time, they say, to leave aside the obsession with
“identity politics”, and listen again to the demands of the working class’.23
The privileging of economic class, as ‘determinant in the last instance’, and
above superstructural ‘private interests’ is paralleled in other dichotomies
such as public and private, or state and civil societies. According to Laclau
and Mouffe, such modes of thought are based on the belief that some things
exist outside discourse. Discourse, in this view, is ‘imaginary’ in the sense
that it is a fiction, only imagined inside one’s head. The authors, however,
refute such claims, writing that if ‘the so-called non-discursive complexes
… are analyzed, we will only find more or less complex forms of differential
positions among objects, which do not arise from … necessity’.24
Matsumoto’s representation of gay boys in his film is itself an example of
the transformation in ‘the condition of politicization’, which, according to
Laclau and Mouffe, is ‘far more radical [today] than any we have known in
the past, because it tends to dissolve the distinction between the public and
private’.25 In defence of Matsumoto, I would argue that he did not mistake
private matters for political or public ones; Funeral intentionally imagines a
queer world in which these realms are inseparable. His detractors would
have done well to consider the premiss of the film’s narrative. Business,
traditionally considered a public matter, is for Eddy intimately entwined
with private life – one of his ongoing sexual affairs is with his boss, whom he
later finds out is also his father.
Matsumoto addresses the conflation of the private and public realms,
perhaps unwittingly, in discussing how he came to cast Peter, then a
non-actor, in the film’s leading role. In a 1972 interview with the director,
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26 Ishizaki Kōichiro, ‘Kurayami no eizō
sakka’ (‘Film director of darkness’),
Kuro no techō (Black Magazine),
vol. 2, no. 1 (1972), pp. 94–95.
27 Takiguchi Shuzō, ‘Bara no sōretsu
wa semaru’ (‘Funeral Parade of
Roses presses on’), Art Theater, no.
70 (1969), p. 5.
published in the ‘Homology’ issue of Black Magazine, the interviewer asks,
‘so there is a film star named Peter and you, Mr Matsumoto, are said to be
the one who caused him to be on television and in films. How did you come
to take an interest in someone like Peter, who has a very unique image?’
Matsumoto explains that when he first encountered Peter, the boy was
working in a gay bar called Don Juan in Roppongi, a district of Tokyo with
many nightclubs. Matsumoto had interviewed ‘about a hundred gay boys
for Eddy’s part’. There was, however, ‘no one whom I fell in love with’.
Until, that is, he ended up at Don Juan at one in the morning, and
a breathtakingly beautiful boy walked into the room, filling it with an
indescribably attractive light. I wasn’t told that he was Peter, but I was
certain it was him. … Feeling that there could be no one else for the part, I
fell in love at first sight and seduced him.26
Matsumoto’s answer is revealing. Not only was Peter a bar worker like
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Eddy, but Matsumoto speaks openly of seduction as a part of his casting
process, playing on the stereotypical image of the casting couch as a site
where private and professional lives collide. The mesmerizing images of
Peter in the film and its promotional materials make one wonder who
seduced whom. A photograph of Eddy’s face dominates the poster for the
film. In it he looks over his right shoulder against a wallpaper-like pattern of
illustrated roses. The roses are placed in concentric circles, forming a halo
radiating from his head (figure 4). This is the film’s most iconic image,
which appears in a single shot: Eddy, his hair up in curls like Elizabeth
Taylor’s Cleopatra, a bejewelled chain of a headband, eyes caked with
mascara, and a star under his right eye, where a beauty mark might be.
Eddy’s chin is slightly tucked under and he looks seductively out and up at
his viewers. The star under his eye was prophetic; Funeral was Peter’s debut
film and it launched him quickly into stardom.
The real problem with training an eye on gay boys, and on Peter in
particular, was not so much that to do so was ‘unreal’ or ‘unserious’ but
rather that Peter’s radiant onscreen presence proved so enrapturing and
overwhelming. In the Funeral Parade of Roses issue of Art Theater, two
prominent critics wrote about the film’s vertigo-inducing effect. Takiguchi
Shuzō, the poet and critic credited with introducing surrealism to Japan,
writes in an introductory essay to the issue that he ‘felt a kind of dizziness in
watching the film’, explaining that he felt this sensation most strongly when
Peter appeared without makeup, as a young Eddy, sitting in front of a mirror.
Takiguchi follows this explanation by noting that, in the film, ‘What appears
as acting takes on a documentary significance, what appears as reality is
rooted in absolute fiction, and what appears as parody is inscribed in
reality’.27 In an accompanying essay, Akiyama Kuniharu, a famed music
critic, composer and poet, similarly notes the film’s dizzying quality. For
him, the feeling of dizziness sets in when the film reveals its own
construction, for example when the director yells, ‘Cut!’ from offscreen to
interrupt a love scene. Akiyama explains this by ventriloquizing the film:
when it says, ‘“This set is a figment of hypothetical reality”, I sense the
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Fig. 4. Asakura Setsu’s poster for
Funeral Parade of Roses.
28 Akiyama Kuniharu, ‘Bara no sōretsu
– arui wa Aruto no chi’ (‘Funeral
Parade of Roses – or Artaud’s
blood’), Art Theater, no. 70 (1969),
p. 8.
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relation between me, the viewer, and the drama, and our respective positions
have been obliterated and I feel dizzy’.28 What Akiyama does not mention is
that the love scene to which he refers is one between Eddy and Tony, a Genet
customer and African American soldier on leave from Vietnam. For
Takiguchi it is the revelation that Peter, beneath the makeup, is ‘just a boy’,
while for Akiyama it is the director’s offstage voice, reminding his viewers
that the love scene is similarly ‘just a fiction’, that makes him dizzy. What
neither addresses is the fact that for Matsumoto to be able to ‘draw the
curtain’ and reveal what is ‘really’ there behind it, both Takiguchi and
Akiyama had to have been enraptured, and in a sense blinded, by Eddy’s
screen presence. The disorienting effect of Eddy’s image is also registered
in the film’s poster, which shows his face up front and centre, but upside
down.
Akiyama’s confession that in watching the love scene between Eddy and
Tony he ‘sense[d] the relation between me, the viewer and the drama, and
our respective positions ha[d] been obliterated and I fe[lt] dizzy’, strongly
resonates with Lee Edelman’s argument that, in Freud’s psychoanalytical
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Fig. 5. Funeral Parade of Roses.
29 Lee Edelman, ‘Seeing things:
representation, the scene of
surveillance, and the spectacle of
gay male sex’, in Diana Fuss (ed.),
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories (New York, NY: Routledge,
1991), p. 95.
30 Ibid., p. 101.
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writings and in other literary works, the ‘inscription of homosexuality in the
sodomitical scene … suggest[s] the instability of positioning that is
sexuality itself’.29 It ‘destabilizes the division between real and imagined,
external and internal, patient and analyst’.30 In Freudian psychoanalysis, as
in Akiyama’s and Takiguchi’s reviews, the sodomitical scene is an image so
powerful that its viewer is unmoored, left knowing neither here from there
nor fact from fiction. Moreover, the destabilization and disorientation to
which Akiyama and Takiguchi confess strongly suggest Leo Bersani’s
theorizations regarding sexual excitement’s psychic shattering of the
subject.
The vertigo thus described may also be a result of countertransference. In
a sequence that beautifully depicts the sometimes overwhelming intensity
of city life and the particularly maddening assemblage of disparate elements
that is Shinjuku, Eddy starts to feel dizzy when he happens upon Zero Jigen
performing the titular ‘funeral procession’ near the East Exit of Shinjuku
Station (figure 5). A line of men in suits marches with one hand raised in a
salute and the other holding an urn. One of them wears a gasmask connected
to his urn. We hear snippets of dissonant responses: a woman can be heard
complaining that it is creepy; seconds later we hear a male voice saying,
‘Hey, this is cool’. As Eddy walks along, we see signs of commerce as sales
banners are draped from a store awning above his head. He looks disturbed.
There is a man lying face-up and motionless on the ground. Eddy continues
to stroll the streets of Shinjuku. A police siren can be heard in the
background. The camera shows an impromptu palm-reading stand set up in
front of the Shinjuku Branch of Mitsui Bank, Japan’s oldest private bank. A
crowd of women stands around the palm-reader. The camera pans to
momentarily show an extradiegetic, stylized, high-contrast shot of Eddy’s
face. A group of men try to pick him up. As he speeds up to avoid them, he
inadvertently gets in the way of a man delivering noodles on his bicycle,
causing both man and noodles to fall to the ground. The sight makes Eddy
dizzy. He faints, closing his eyes and collapsing against a wall of posters for
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Fig. 6. Funeral Parade of Roses.
31 Katō Yoshihiro, ‘Kokyo Nagoya no
Sakemachi de geijutsu terrorist
zenra shudan ‘Zero Jigen’ wa tanjou
shita’ (‘The naked art terrorist group
Zero Jigen was born in Sakemachi,
Nagoya’), Ragan, no. 3, December
1986, p. 7.
32 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Queer and
now’, in Tendencies (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993), p. 8.
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Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967), released just two years before
Funeral (figure 6).
Through the inclusion in this sequence of signs representing capital, such
as the sale banners and the Mitsui Bank building, Matsumoto intertwines
the existential malaise conventionally felt particularly acutely by city
inhabitants, the dislocation of viewers caused by the sight of sodomitical
relations, and Japan’s dizzyingly fast-paced, so-called ‘miraculous’
economic growth, which reached its apex around the time of the film’s
production. It is no coincidence that Katō Yoshihiro, the leader of Zero
Jigen, whose performance triggers Eddy’s dizzy spell, explained the effect
of his group’s performances as follows: ‘The entire city in pursuit of high
economic growth – cars, people and buildings – gradually stopped moving,
like [in] a slow-motion movie’.31 Similarly, Matsumoto may have imagined
that the gay boys represented an alternative to, and a potential to disturb,
Japan’s privileging of capital and GNP growth. The film shows these ideals
as potentialities. If such a disturbance, which is only suggested in the film’s
final scene, were possible, the film suggests that it might be enabled by
queerness rather than gayness. That is to say, it is the associations made
between various outsiders who have little in common except for their
exclusion from the mainstream and its definition of normality. As Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick has written, ‘“Queer” seems to hinge much more
radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative
acts of experimental self-perception and filiation’.32
Dizzying capitalist growth would have been very apparent in Shinjuku,
where the landscape was rapidly being transformed by the introduction of
large department stores and towering skyscrapers. Such urban business
development predictably entailed the displacement and diminished use of
public space. For hustlers like Eddy, these spatial issues would have been of
paramount importance. Sekine notes that before the Odakyu department
store opened in Shinjuku in November 1962, ‘two or three male prostitutes
appeared as if by prior arrangement at dusk to loiter’ at a nearby public
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33 Sekine, Waga Shinjuku!, p. 36.
34 Ibid., p. 38.
35 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping:
Cinema and the Postmodern
(Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1993), p. 80.
36 Matsumoto, ‘Kizuguchi to wa’,
p. 16.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 17.
lavatory. Once the department store had opened, however, these men
disappeared entirely. Sekine considers some possible causes for this
disappearance: perhaps the lights from the department store, which stayed
on all night, robbed the bathroom of its dim ambience, or maybe the
department store reported the prostitutes to the police in order to protect its
reputation.33 Ultimately, he reports that he read in a magazine article that city
ordinances had become stricter, forcing the men to find jobs in bars.34 As
public space became more privatized, the act of lingering was criminalized;
a bar like Genet, where Funeral’s gay boys work, would have been the
destination of just such displaced prostitutes.
The Odakyu department store, mentioned by Sekine, also appears in a
scene in Funeral. Just as Sekine’s text suggests, the gay boys in Funeral do
not occupy Shinjuku in any illegal ways: they go to Odakyu not to sell their
bodies or to meet men but to browse. As Anne Friedberg notes in her
examination of nineteenth-century visual experience, the department store,
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which formed a world of its own, ‘encouraged lingering in a public space,
[and] legitimized a new form of loitering through its association with
consumption’.35 Not just any kind of consumption, however, for
prostitution too is a form of commerce. Tamuro suru is the Japanese phrase
for ‘to loiter’ that Sekine uses to describe the male prostitute’s appropriation
of public space for personal profit. While ‘loitering’ in English implies a
certain idleness or shiftiness, tamuro has military origins and was initially
used in the sense of being ‘stationed’. This etymology suggests the political
and strategic significance of loitering and occupying public space. In the
new and brightly lit Shinjuku, it would seem, one is no longer allowed to
loiter in public space. Loitering is only permissible when associated with
‘official business’. As with the pedestrian’s heaven, the authorities
prohibited certain uses of space, only to reproduce them elsewhere on their
own terms.
‘Today’, Matsumoto wrote in 1969, ‘all kinds of issues are tangled
together in a complex web, repeatedly twisted. Moreover, the entire web is
flowing and changing.’36 The same might be said not only of the complex
narrative structure of Funeral, but also of the social lives of its characters.
The cast members belong to numerous subcultures: the gay boys, at least
one of whom, Eddy, is also a drug dealer; fūten, some of whom are also
experimental filmmakers; and the student activists. Although Matsumoto
chose to depict gay boys for the potential he saw in them to be ‘daggers’, no
particular group is privileged as agents of resistance or rebellion.
Matsumoto also observed, ‘Not only are dualist frameworks dissolving but
also the terms of the dualisms are being reversed’.37 What Matsumoto
identified was an eradication of stability, a condition that he saw as being
epitomized by queer sexuality. Funeral, however, refuses to present itself as
a ‘gay rights’ film because it rejects political positions that can be
predetermined or stated with certainty. Likening the homosexual to the
artist, Matsumoto wrote, ‘Neither is nonconformist by definition.
Particularly in Japanese culture, they tend to be sapped of their venom and
essence turned into popular culture.’38
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39 Ōshima Nagisa and Matsumoto
Toshio, ‘Wareware wa machigatte
itarouka’ (‘Were we mistaken?’),
Eiga hyōron (Film Criticism),
November 1968, p. 30.
40 Ibid., p. 31.
41 Warner, Publics and
Counterpublics, p. 142.
Matsumoto understood that political subjects are not preexisting beings
that simply wield or yield to power; they are instead produced in and through
power relations. The debate between Matsumoto and Ōshima, played out
over three issues of the journal Eiga hyōron indicates that the two
filmmakers had very different ideas regarding what constitutes politics,
activism and film production, what counts as ‘radical’ cinema, and what role
cinema ought to play in political activism. Ōshima criticized Matsumoto,
whom he called his ‘comrade’, for being ‘obtuse to current trends’, writing
too much and shooting too little, and being too ambiguous in regard to
political positioning. ‘I am a commercial director’, Ōshima argued, ‘so my
position is clear. But yours is vague. Over there you praise Godard and over
here you side with something else.’ Matsumoto’s rebuttal upsets the logic of
Ōshima’s accusation through the use of a spatial metaphor.
Basically, I’m looking at things in terms of lateral connections rather than
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vertical segmentation. I’m talking about alignment on an invisible,
psychological, and ideological level rather than literal physical
proximity. … There are non-socialists in socialist countries, just as there
are people who fundamentally refute capitalism but live in a capitalist
nation.39
Further on in the conversation, Ōshima declares independent filmmaking to
be fundamentally radical: ‘The strongest force capable of transforming
Japanese film is independent film production’. Matsumoto is sceptical, and
replies that ‘Some independently produced films are made because the five
studios demand them’.40 Clearly, for Ōshima, certain agents and sites are
predestined to lead the revolution. The differences in the directors’
respective ideologies, evidenced in this conversation, can also be seen in
Diary and Funeral. The films betray two very distinct ways of
understanding not only cinema but also political communities and the uses
of urban space. Their definitions regarding the location of radical practice
overlap with questions of what and who rightfully inhabit the ‘political’
realm. Although both films represent Shinjuku as a political space,
Ōshima’s film is more prescriptive, and the ‘political’ is predetermined; in
Matsumoto’s Funeral, on the other hand, it is indeterminate and future-
oriented.
If by political activism we mean action taken by subjects identified in
advance as ‘political’, we subscribe to an essentialist belief that seriously
limits the efficacy of social subjects and the terrain from which political
change might arise. Funeral refutes this popular understanding of political
engagement; one that presumes, as Michael Warner writes regarding what is
conventionally expected of the public intellectual, ‘that an untroubling and
familiar idiom is essential … that meaningful work is necessarily
performed within the headline temporality of what currently counts as
politics’.41 Seen from this conservative view, Funeral makes very little
reference to political action; and when it does, the relation of film and its
protagonists to it are both mediated and ambivalent. Consider, for example,
the first appearance of student activists in the film, in a sequence that takes
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42 Burch, To the Distant Observer,
p. 356.
43 Matsumoto Toshio, Eiga no
henkaku: geijutsuteki radicalism to
wa nanika (Revolution in Film: What
Does Artistic Radicalism Mean?)
(Tokyo: Sanichi Shobō, 1972),
p. 237.
place at Genet, in which Eddy is shown handing a customer a cigarette box
of drugs, then go-go dancing to a rock instrumental with Tony. Next we see
Jimmy, a bar employee, making out with a customer in the toilets. These
initial shots present the characters of Genet as apolitical and hedonistic.
Finally, the film cuts to show Eddy and Tony, joyfully drunk and staggering
towards a T-junction, most likely in the Kabukicho area of Shinjuku.
Suddenly, and in stark contrast to their drunkenness, chanted slogans
become audible and two helmeted activists wielding two-by-fours appear
from around the corner, running towards and then past Eddy and Tony, as
the latter yells, ‘Hey, where are you going?’ Although it seems an innocent
enough question, perhaps a drunken appeal made requesting their company,
when considered with what follows, the question takes on a different hue,
more an expression of doubt regarding the effectiveness of their methods.
In the next scene, in an example of what Burch describes as numerous
‘diegetic disruptions’,42 the film cuts to a wavering image of a political
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demonstration with intermittent sound. The thin horizontal lines running
across the frame suggest what is confirmed in the next shot – that the footage
has been rephotographed from a television monitor. We first hear Guevara’s
voice – ‘Hold it! Hold it!’ – then we see him directing the long-haired, oval
sunglasses-wearing cameraman, who is operating a Bolex 16mm camera.
The previously introduced fūten and Guevara are using a television
broadcast of a political demonstration as raw material for their experimental
film. The scene effectively distances the film from ‘politics’ and its
protagonists from the ‘the leading ideology of the students’, though this is
not to say that the film is apolitical. In fact Matsumoto described what he
identified as the global ‘increase of homosexuals’ as ‘growing like a
cryptogam, no less, in the shadows of the culture of over-mature
capitalism’.43 As an image, ‘growth in the shadows’ suggests underground
activities, through which are made linkages and networks, invisible to those
who shy away from the night. In Funeral, Shinjuku is not so much a
geographical location as a web of immanent, impermanent alliances and
networks – a model for a new kind of interpersonal association, and of the
social that refuses closure or stabilization.
Ōshima’s take on Shinjuku is typically more overtly political. Posters and
trailers for Diary described it simply: ‘City of riots: Shinjuku’. The opening
scene of Diary takes place in precisely the same setting as the fūten are
introduced in Funeral: Shinjuku Station’s East Exit Plaza. In Diary, the real-
life, avant-garde dramatist Jurō Kara and his crew stage an impromptu
performance. One of the film’s most notable aspects is the fact that its cast
comprises many key figures of the 1960s cultural scene appearing as
themselves. Tanabe Moichi, a historian/spokesperson for Shinjuku and
then president of Kinokuniya, the most vital bookstore of the day, located
just down the street from where this performance is staged, plays himself, as
do the regular cast of Ōshima films, including Satō Kei, Watanabe Fumio
and Toura Rokko. Takahashi Tetsu, Japan’s most recognized sexologist,
also appears as himself. Although playing a fictional role, Tadanori Yokoo
would have been recognizable to viewers as one of the most in-demand
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20
graphic designers of the day, who had produced posters not only for Kara
but also for Terayama and others. While the poster for Diary asserts that
‘reality destroys fiction’ and ‘fiction smashes reality’, the film’s cast
suggests that Ōshima was heavily invested in producing an atmosphere of
authenticity and verisimilitude. That Ōshima felt the film’s claim to reality
was crucial is corroborated by the fact that the film ends, like a payoff for the
tagline used to advertise the film, with real-life footage of a riot. ‘City of
riots’ is thus an adopted description not simply of Shinjuku, but of the image
of Shinjuku that Ōshima’s film actively produces.
Funeral, too, is very much invested in producing an effect of
verisimilitude. Like Diary, it incorporates documentary footage into its
fictional narrative, but is a deeply selfconscious film, aware that the ‘reality’
it produces is an effect. That Funeral is concerned with realism is also
evidenced by two phrases describing the film that appear repeatedly on the
film’s official poster and print adverts. One loudly proclaims, ‘Starring

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seven real gay boys’, while the other dramatically claims, in a pun on what
Eddy will do to his eyes once he discovers Gonda is his father, ‘Gouging out
the actuality of sexual inversion’. The trailer for Funeral, which begins with
a profile shot of Peter that closely recalls Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests,
produced a few years earlier, also advertises the film’s ‘seven real gay boys’.
An intertitle asks, ‘Is it a sin or an illness?’ These taglines are clearly used to
produce a sensational effect, much like contemporary ‘pink’ films’ attempts
to draw viewers into the cinema. They are used so emphatically, however,
that they necessitate a consideration of what Funeral actually conveys about
‘sexual inversion’, particularly through its nonfiction elements. The
documentary elements of the film comprise interviews with the ‘real gay
boys’ (half of whom are not actors in the film’s story), which are
interspersed throughout the film. Their content, however, neither sheds
light on the ‘actuality of sexual inversion’ nor answers whether
homosexuality is a sin or an illness. The interviewees’ answers, in fact,
refuse to cohere or align themselves as knowledge fit for easy consumption.
The interviews show a range of ‘gay boys’; some are dressed as women,
others are not. As a document of the faces that constituted the ‘gay boy’
scene, these interviews are fascinating. The questions that Matsumoto asks
initially seem inane, but suggest upon closer examination a refusal to
assume any truths regarding his subjects’ identities. The first of the
interviews proceeds like this:
Interviewer: So what motivated you to become a gay boy?
Mariko: Well, I wanted to be like this, a woman. I mean, I like it.
Interviewer: You like women.
Mariko: No I like becoming one.
In the second, the interviewer asks, ‘You say you like being gay. You mean
you like men?’ The third interview is with Usagi (Rabbit), who plays Leda.
The interviewer asks, ‘So, gay boys, um, aren’t that interested in women as

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21
 sexual objects then?’ The queries seem tautologous, but they also imply the
possibility of a queer rather than a gay sexuality. Usagi’s answer supports
such a reading by explaining that he does not want to become an actual
woman and thereby refusing a heteronormative logic, which frames
homosexuality as an inversion of heterosexuality. In a sense, Matsumoto
performs a bait-and-switch; if filmgoers really expected the ‘truth’ of
homosexual identity to be revealed in Funeral, they would have been very
disappointed. Matsumoto’s move, however, is tactical. The interviews are
necessarily confusing because Matsumoto does not intend to offer his
subjects as nuggets of knowledge for the viewer to consume. Diary’s riot
footage, which Ōshima positions as the film’s signified, functions very
differently as an anchor for stable political meaning. Immediately prior to
the riot footage, the film shows Birdie and Umeko making love, with a
conversation between Birdie/Yokoo and Umeko/Yokoyama playing over
the scene. The voices are Birdie’s and Umeko’s but their manner of

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speaking is distinctly out of character, which suggests that what we hear is a
conversation between the actors. In this conversation, Yokoyama explains
that a ‘probably deranged’ American boy of about fourteen years old
stabbed her when she herself was eighteen and out walking in Shinjuku. She
explains that she felt sorry for the boy, who had no parents in Japan. She does
not blame him, but she feels some anger about it. While the story is
suggestive, it is related as purely a personal matter and the shot frames the
two tightly to divorce them from the setting in which they make love. In
strong contrast, the scene of the police station that begins the riot footage is
shot wide, from a distance. This final scene is the only one in which we see
‘the public’ in any detail. The film thus underscores the separation between
the political and private, which remain inextricably tied in Funeral.
Ōshima’s essay ‘Regarding the scenario’ suggests that he considered the
riot scene the most important. He first berates critics for not attempting to
understand what is being shown in the riot footage, then goes on to explain:
What is depicted is the 29 June 1968 ‘Fūten Gathering’ held at Hanazono
Shrine, and the crowd from the event moving to Shinjuku Station and
throwing rocks at the East Exit police station. … After this incident, the
‘revolt’ of the masses in Shinjuku would escalate – from the 10.8 to the
10.21 incidents – but 6.29 [these numbers refer to dates of major clashes
between student demonstrators in 1968] is when the first stone was
thrown. This was the first time in sixteen years that a stone had been
thrown at a police station. It is always my hope that my films would be
such a stone. Naturally, industry riff-raff fail to understand, much less
44 Ōshima, ‘Scenario ni tsuite’, p. 21. make such films.44
By explaining that his film would ideally function like a stone thrown
through the window of a police station (the film ends with the image of such
a hole [figure 7]) Ōshima suggests that, for him, ‘radicalness’ in film can
only come from its use-value. In short, film must function as propaganda in
order to be political. In another essay Ōshima treads similar ground,
characterizing the 29 June event captured by his cameramen as a

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22

Fig. 7. Diary of a Shinjuku Thief.
45 Ōshima Nagisa, ‘Jōkyō to undō no
nakadeno eiga’ (‘Film in the
movement and situations’), in Kaitai
to funshutsu (Dissolution and
Eruption) (Tokyo: Hagashoten,
1970), p. 103.
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premonition of later October events, though he focuses this time on the
struggles of his crew – on how the cameramen were unfairly arrested and
how hard they had to work to save the film from being confiscated by the
police. As a result, Ōshima concludes,
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief captured the ideology of the masses in Shinjuku
who rioted in 1969. I won’t say that I captured the leading ideology of the
students. … Was it not, however, the masses that the authority feared?
The masses that would throw stones out of its natural sensibility and
destroy train stations without realizing that its actions are criminal; these
are the masses in which most of the characters in Diary could be found.45
What Ōshima proposes is thus a populist uprising against state authorities.
Very few of ‘the masses’, however, visually figure in Diary. When they are
shown – in Kinokuniya and in the opening sequence shot in the East Exit
area of Shinjuku Station – the camera tracks past them as if they were no
more than a landscape, in distinct contrast to representation of the film’s real
stars. The stars of Diary are doubly insiders: they are insiders not only of the
film but also of Shinjuku, for they are the elite of Shinjuku’s underground
culture. The gay boy stars of Funeral, by contrast, would have been
unknown to most of the film’s viewers. When Kara and his players perform
in front of Shinjuku Station in Diary, a crowd quickly gathers. Kara is being
chased for thieving, and strips to prove his innocence.
While the crowd stands still to watch, Birdie walks around, weaving
between the performers and the audience. Since the camera follows Birdie,
the only non-performer moving in this play within a film, he is visually
distinguished from the mass of people. The same can be said of the first
sequence in the film shot inside Kinokuniya Bookstore. The sequence
begins with a shot of Birdie standing behind a shelf of books. The camera
zooms in on his face. He pulls a book out, puts it back, and starts walking; the
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46 For Laclau and Mouffe, such a
sutured society is impossible.
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy, p. 95.
47 Matsumoto Toshio, ‘Taishū to iu
nano busshin ni tsuite’ (‘On the
fetishization of the masses’), in Eizō
no hakken (Avant Garde to
Documentary) (Tokyo: Sanichi
Shobo, 1969), p. 224.
camera pans to follow him. In the next shot, he is shown in closeup. Then the
camera follows behind him as he walks through the crowded bookstore. His
swift movement sets him apart from the crowd. He finally isolates himself,
away from the crowd of other shoppers, in the store’s stairwell, until Umeko
grabs his hand to stop him from making off with the books he has shoplifted.
From this point on, the film will show virtually no non-professional extras
until the closing footage of the riot.
For Ōshima, both the mass and its opponent are predetermined and fixed
elements. Perplexingly, while Ōshima aims to present the mass movement
as one of universal political emancipation, it is instead shown as a backdrop
for the real action of the film – the romance between Birdie and Umeko.
Ideologically, the mass is the only viable political agent in Diary. The
serendipitously shot riot footage is thus offered as the ‘meaning’ of the film;
it grounds Diary as a political film. If it is ultimately the ideology of the
masses that the authorities fear, and this is what the film captures, then both
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the film and the world it shows are closed entities. Diary can only serve,
then, as a portrait of a closed society – in a sense like the traditional city
symphony. As Laclau and Mouffe point out, the relations between elements
within a closed society have no room to shift. Openness must therefore be
considered the constitutive ground for the social field of differences.46 If we
accept their argument, Ōshima’s political aspirations are in fact
unachievable, for without room for movement, the existing relations of
domination cannot be changed.
In stark contrast to Ōshima’s ideological, if not visual, valorization of the
masses, Matsumoto wrote an essay, in the same year that he directed
Funeral, criticizing the tendency he saw among ‘weak-minded critics’ to
defer to what they thought the ‘masses’ wanted. For example, he notes that
he has been taken to task, just as Ōshima has, for being too difficult, and thus
elitist, and not for or of the people. In response, Matsumoto problematizes
the fixed notion of a preexisting mass or public. Taking critics to task for
simplistically championing the masses, he wrote, ‘The image of the
“public” created in their feeble minds is a product of totally ahistorical, non-
scientific, and abstract thought’.47 For Matsumoto, the public or the masses
are produced discursively and are thus necessarily contingent and historical.
Funeral represents and produces a new kind of political space in the ‘web’
produced through the association between numerous subcultural groups; it
expands the notion of the political by showing that ‘democratic
antagonisms’ might emerge from anywhere. While Diary captures a riot, it
does little to show how one might be organized, let alone how new networks
might be forged. Funeral is far from a pragmatic guide to political action,
but it does give visual representation to new kinds of coalitions. In one
scene, Eddy comes home to find a bloodied, groaning student activist in the
stairwell of his apartment block. The activist tells Eddy that he has been
chased by the police. Eddy takes the man into his room to bandage his head.
‘Why do you use so much violence?’ Eddy asks. ‘To topple national power’,
the student answers. ‘I still don’t think violence is good’, Eddy says, and the
student replies with an obviously memorized, long-winded and obtuse
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Fig. 8. Funeral Parade of Roses.
48 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s)
(New York, NY: Verso, 2007), p. 57.
49 Yasunao Tone describes Jonas
Mekas as being known as the ‘guru
of underground cinema’, in
‘Geijutsu no chikaku hendō’
(‘Tectonic transformations in art’),
Bijutsu techo (Art Notebook),
November 1967, p. 103.
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speech. As he gives this response, he is framed alone, outside of the diegetic
space (figure 8). In the middle of his rant, Eddy looks at his watch and says,
‘Oh, look at the time, I have to go’. Eddy is clearly unsympathetic to this
man’s political positioning, yet we know from a previous scene, in which a
police officer visits Genet, making Gonda scramble to hide his drugs, that
‘the cops’ are something drug-dealer Eddy would also like to avoid. He and
the student thus enter a relation of equivalence, forming an impermanent
and fragile coalition defined by their shared position outside the law. As
Laclau has argued:
The ‘something identical’ shared by all the terms of the equivalential
chain … cannot be something positive … but proceeds from the unifying
effects that the external threat poses to an otherwise perfectly
heterogeneous set of differences (particularities).48
In this sense, the cops are the external threat that allows Eddy and the student
activist to forge a momentary chain of equivalence.
Similarly when Eddy and Juju, another Bar Genet employee, are at
Guevara’s house, where he and his fūten pals are screening their
experimental film, and Guevara asks them what they think of it, Eddy’s
initial response is ‘I’m not really sure … I’ve never seen anything like it’.
Juju says, ‘It’s called angura [underground], isn’t it?’ In response, Sabu,
one of the fūtens, starts to recite a quotation from Jonas Mekas, the most
recognized critic and promoter of US underground cinema, whom he
mistakenly refers to ‘Menas Jokas’, provoking the laughter of his more
studious filmmaking peers.49 By showing both the student activist and Sabu
uncritically regurgitating so-called radical speech to no effect, Matsumoto
underscores the notion that being radical is contingently defined. ‘Well it
must have made you feel something’, Guevara insists, taking recourse to the
universal. Eddy somewhat begrudgingly responds, ‘Well, I guess I felt like I
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Fig. 9. Funeral Parade of Roses.
50 Chantal Mouffe, ‘Deliberative
democracy or agonistic pluralism?’,
Social Research, vol. 66, no. 3
(1999), p. 754.
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was high’, and begins to distribute (that is, sell) joints to his friends. What is
depicted in Eddy’s interactions with both the student activist and the fūten
filmmakers is a miscommunication. If there is a connection between these
people, it is not positive, ideal or stable: Eddy is willing to help out a student
activist, but not to listen to his political babble; he will come to a screening of
his friends’ film, but does not seem enthusiastic about it per se, and will also
use the occasion for his own monetary gain. While all three parties – student
activists, fūten/experimental filmmakers and gay boys – occupy the social
peripheries, and occasionally the same physical spaces, they are
heterogeneous and have little in common. What they do share is defined by
something outside of them. Their association is based on differences and
equivalences rather than on predetermined identity or politics, as we usually
understand these terms. Funeral thus imagines a model of the ‘political’ in the
sense defined by Mouffe when she distinguishes it from ‘politics’. The
‘political’, she asserts, is a ‘dimension of antagonism that is inherent in all
human society … [and] that can emerge in diverse social relations’. ‘Politics’,
on the other hand, is the attempt to build a consensus by extinguishing these
antagonisms, which Mouffe argues are an essential part of democracy.50
Eddy, the other gay boys, the fūten and the student activist might be said,
therefore, to constitute a ‘crowd’ rather than a ‘group’. In his remarkable
study, Nippon/Gendai/Bijutsu, contemporary art and music critic Sawaragi
Noi examines the Yomiuri Independent, an open exhibition series that
served as a fertile ground, arguably the most important, for the development
of the 1960s Japanese avant garde; it was, ironically, corporately sponsored
by Yomiuri Shimbun, one of the largest newspapers in Japan. Sawaragi uses
the terms ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’, the three ideals of the French
Revolution, to identify the structure behind the Yomiuri Independent,
arguing that the most recognized artists to come out of the exhibition lacked
any sense of ‘fraternity’. What was left, he argues, was an uncontrollable
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Fig. 10. Funeral Parade of Roses.
51 Sawaragi Noi, Nippon/gendai/
bijutsu (Japan/Modern/Art) (Tokyo:
Shinchousha, 1998), p. 242.
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organic expansion, and as a result these artists did not constitute a group so
much as a crowd. The members of a crowd, Sawaragi asserts, share no
common aesthetic; such crowds share no ideology, principles or aesthetics.
They simply convene and disperse according to available opportunities.
When they do convene, however, their unity is potentially explosive and
their actions easily become (self-) destructive.51 Counter to Sawaragi’s
pejorative use of ‘crowd’, however, I want to read it as a new, experimental
model of filiation. As one such crowd – less than a unified group, but more
than a random cross-section of the masses – the characters in Funeral, who
produce their own media and operate a literally underground economy, hint
at how networks might be politicized.
In the final scenes of Funeral, which unfold in Gonda’s apartment, Eddy
becomes, as Sawaragi writes of the crowd, self-destructive and potentially
explosive. Walking into the bathroom and finding that Gonda has stabbed
himself to death, Eddy realizes what Gonda had already discovered – that
they are father and son. Using the same knife with which Gonda killed
himself, Eddy gouges out his eyes in front of a mirror (figure 9). The scene is
shot from behind Eddy’s head, so that we see the mirrored image of the face
he can no longer see himself. Knife in hand, he walks out onto the street,
confronting a mass of people who have gathered to see the horrific sight
(figure 10). The shot evokes the earlier footage of Zero Jigen’s funeral
parade. At the end of the film, however, Shinjuku can no longer be seen as a
stage for freewheeling performances. Eddy’s blinded eyes suggest the
restrictions that Shinjuku’s spaces exert on its unwanted inhabitants.
Matsumoto described this final scene as Eddy’s transformation into a
political agent. Thus the film ends by hinting at a future, suggesting
possibilities rather than providing a conclusion of fireworks, as Diary does
with its riot footage. What Eddy will do with his newly found agency
remains to be seen. His knife, however, is pointed towards the gang of
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people surrounding him. Matsumoto explains this as a critique of the
masses, the status quo. In other words, for Matsumoto it is a gesture of
violence. I would like to suggest, instead, that Eddy is etching out a space for
his crowd among the masses in Shinjuku. The city, and Shinjuku in
particular, at the end of the 1960s was increasingly designed to promote
economic interests while curtailing those of others; the Japanese
government prioritized the growth of the country’s GNP over its citizens’
quality of life, propagating the myth of a homogenous middle class to
the exclusion of minorities and the poor. Against the odds, however, the
film suggests that the city provides pockets of relatively autonomous
space for productive antagonisms. Moreover, this final scene, which
pits Eddy against the masses, shows that exclusion is precisely what
engenders the political.

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