Politics, Porn and Protest - Japanese Avant-Garde Cinema in The 1960s and 1970s

POLITICS, PORN
AND PROTEST
POLITICS,
PORN AND
PROTEST
JAPANESE AVANT-GARDE
CINEMA IN THE
1960s AND 1970s
BY
I S O L D E S TA N D I S H
2011
The Continuum International Publishing Group

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Copyright © 2011 Isolde Standish
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Standish, Isolde.
Politics, porn, and protest : Japanese avant-garde cinema in the 1960s and
1970s / by Isolde Standish.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-4470-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8264-4470-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-3901-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8264-3901-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures–Political aspects–Japan. 2. Motion pictures–Japan–History–20th
century. 3. Experimental films–Japan–History–20th century. I. Title.
PN1993.5.J3S73 2011
791.430952–dc22 2011003730
EISBN: 978-1-4411-4439-3
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in the United States of America
To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means
to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a
philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone,
beyond good and evil. (Nietzsche 1990: 36)
Better be wrong and murder no one than be right in a slaughter-

house. (Albert Camus quoted in Cohen-Solal 2005: 305)
CONTENTS
Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Film and Philosophy: Towards

a Cinema of Praxis 15
2 The Art Theatre Guild: Theatres of Death and the
Challenge of History 49
3 Overcoming History: Originary Societies,
Pornography and Terrorism 79
4 Documentary and Performance 115
Reflections 145
Notes 157
Filmography 165
Select Bibliography 171
Appendix: Historical Chronology 177
Index 187
— vii —
NOTES ON TRANSLATION AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Japanese names are given in the Japanese order of surname and first
name. In the case of film titles, where standard known English translations
exist I have followed custom. In the case of films made by Yoshida (Kijū)
Yoshishige, I have also given the French titles as many of his films have
been released recently on DVD in France. In the Filmography I have given
the titles in Japanese in kanji (Chinese ideograms) to avoid confusion.
In most cases I have taken the Japanese readings for the romanization of
film titles from the Pia Cinemakurabu Nihon Eiga Hen 2007 annual film
reference. I have also drawn primarily on this source for the readings of
names, the birth and, where applicable, death dates of filmmakers and
actors. Alternative sources included the Kinema Junpō publications of the
complete directory for directors (1988), actors (1991) and actresses (1991).
As with film titles, I have included the dates of filmmakers and actors in
the first reference to them in each chapter. I have done this as some readers
may wish to read a chapter as a discrete entity. In regard to the dates of
historical and literary figures, I have drawn primarily on the fifth edition of
the Kōjien (Iwanami Shoten) and the Nihon Daihyakka Zensho Nipponica
Lite Pack CD-ROM (Shogakukan 2003).
I have made use of macrons to indicate long vowel sounds when
transliterating Japanese names and words. I have excluded them from
well-known place-names, such as Tokyo and Kyoto. All translations from
the Japanese are my own unless otherwise stated. Quotations from
Japanese films were taken both from the videos/DVDs during repeated
viewings and from screenplays when available. However, in the cases of
the following films, which have been released with good quality English
language subtitles, I have stayed close to the subtitled translations –
Insect Woman (1963), The Pornographers (1966), Under the Flag of the
Rising Sun (1972), Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 (1974) and The
Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987).
— ix —
x Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements
Due to the great breadth of a topic of this nature, I cannot claim to be

an expert in all its facets. Therefore, I fully acknowledge that during the
past 25 years that I have spent watching films and reading about Japanese
cinema, I have absorbed and been influenced by many sources, both second-
and in some instances third-hand, making it difficult to trace back ideas
and suggestions to their origins. Hence I have limited my references to
actual quotations and in some instances to the authority for statements
which may appear controversial. However, in terms of acknowledgements,
I would like to thank Laura Mulvey for her support with my successful
AHRC Research Leave application. The AHRC Research Leave Award
combined with a one-term sabbatical granted by the School of Oriental
and African Studies, gave me an invaluable nine months free to focus on
writing in 2006/2007. I would also like to thank my editor at Continuum,
David Barker, for his continued support and the copy editors at Newgen
for their careful editing of the text. Finally, acknowledgement should be
made to the students whose great enthusiasm for Japanese films generated
many lively and inspiring discussions.
INTRODUCTION
I
n 2003, Fukasaku Kinji, one of Japan’s first generation of
post-World War II filmmakers, succumbed to cancer having
made his last film, Battle Royale II (2003) with the assistance
of his son. According to an article published in the Japanese film journal,
Kinema Junpō, Battle Royale II was inspired by the events of 9/11, not in
the sense of outrage so often expressed in the Western media or the
unabashed heroism of Hollywood productions, such as United 93 (Paul
Greengrass 2006) and World Trade Center (Oliver Stone 2006), but in the
sense of paramnesia that Japan had lived with the consequences of Ameri-
can post-World War II imperial ambitions since the mid-1940s. As his son
explains, ‘more than the public controversy about the rights and wrongs of
retaliation, [Fukasaku Kinji 1930–2003] talked about [9/11] on a more
personal level. It was the question of the hatred he had felt for Americans
when he was young. And at this time I think this question once again
boiled up’ (quoted in Nakayama 2003: 34).1 Out of this background –
war, occupation and the legacies of Japan’s post-defeat politics driven by
US imperial imperatives – there emerged, in the 1960s, a dissentient group
of avant-garde filmmakers who created a counter-cinema that addressed a
newly constituted, politically conscious audience.
While there was no formal manifesto for this movement and the
various key filmmakers of the period experimented with very different
conceptions of visual style, it is possible to identify an ethical position that
motivated many of these filmmakers. A generational consciousness based
on political opposition was intimately linked to the student movements of the
1950s and 1960s. Also, they shared experiences as Japan’s first generation
of post-war filmmakers who were artistically stifled by a monopolistic and
hierarchal commercial studio system that had emerged reinvigorated in the
wake of the ‘red purges’ of the late 1940s. Born around 1930, their youth
was dominated by the final stages of the war, the deprivations of defeat and
the US-led occupation; they thus formed part of what became known
colloquially as the ‘generation of the burnt-out ruins’ (Yakeatoha2).
—1—
2 Politics, Porn and Protest
At a time when the major studios were in the early stages of an

irreversible decline, the independent distribution company Art Theatre
Guild (ATG) formed an industry-based focal point around which this
nascent avant-garde converged. ATG began in 1962 as an ‘art house’
distribution company specializing in the importation of films from Europe.
Simultaneously launching the journal Art Theatre, ATG became the
cinephile centre of Japanese cultural life and the arbiter of a ‘taste’ linked
specifically to a new post-war, politically conscious, intellectual elite.
By the mid-1960s the company had expanded into jointly funding local
productions with filmmakers, many of whom would collectively become
known as Japan’s Nouvelle Vague3 and with whom this study is primarily
concerned – Ōshima Nagisa (1932–), Teshigahara Hiroshi (1927–), Imamura
Shōhei (1926–2006), Yoshida (Kijū) Yoshishige (1933–) and Okamoto
Kihachi (1924–2005).4
In view of Fukasaku Kinji’s comments above, it is clear that the weight
of history still ‘presses heavily on the present’.5 Therefore, it seems to be
an appropriate historical juncture to reconsider the question of dissent in
the cultural landscape of Japan in the post-war period. Furthermore, since
the death of the Shōwa Emperor in 19896 and the ‘bursting of the
economic bubble’ in the1990s, there has been an ongoing historical reap-
praisal of the legacies of the post-defeat decade. This reappraisal will
only intensify with the internecine leadership struggles of the Liberal
Democratic Party – ongoing since Koizumi Junichirō resigned as leader in
2006 – and in large part are due to the reopening of debates on Japan’s
post-war ‘Peace’ Constitution. Relatedly, issues such as ‘national iden-
tity’, the level of popular acquiescence in post-war reconstruction, and the
anti-Anpo struggles of 1959 and 1968–1969, all issues formerly swept
under the carpet of economic affluence and dubious theories of racial
homogeneity (nihonjinron) popular in the late 1970s and 1980s, have
resurfaced in academic debate (Oguma 2005; Suga 2005a, 2005b).7
Indeed, John Dower’s study of the post-defeat decade, Embracing Defeat,
translated into Japanese as Haiboku o dakishimeru, is cited within this
context. As Oguma (2005) demonstrates, Japanese intellectual discourses
around defeat, reconstruction, national and cultural identity were complex
and rarely as ‘embracing’ as current historiography and Japan’s post-war
leaders would have us believe.
In terms of film history, the debates around the Japanese Nouvelle
Vague film movement of the 1960s are also being reopened as expensive
boxed DVD sets of the films of directors such as Ōshima Nagisa, Imamura
Shōhei, Wakamatsu Kōji, Okamoto Kihachi and Yoshida Yoshishige are
Introduction 3
being released and eminent Japanese film scholars such as Yomota Inuhiko
(2004) are reappraising the works of these often marginalized filmmakers.
Due, I suspect, to the difficulty in obtaining films with subtitles to date,
there have been few accounts in English of the movement. Noël Burch has
a short but useful appendix in To the Distant Observer. However, apart
from studies of individual directors (Turim 1998 and Bock 1978), David
Desser’s study Eros Plus Massacre (1988) is probably the best-known
overview of the movement. Drawing primarily on Western sources and
interpretations (Joan Mellon, Audie Bock, Keiko MacDonald and to a
lesser extent Noël Burch), Desser focuses on a contextualization of
seminal films from the movement released in the West on the ‘art house’
cinema circuit. However, in English and Japanese language accounts
of Japanese cinema there has been a tendency to place an emphasis on
narrative content through plot description at the expense of an analysis
of visual style, and the current study is mindful of the need to redress
this imbalance. As Susan Sontag reminds us, we should aim to dissolve
‘considerations of content into those of form’ (1982: 103). I have drawn
primarily on Japanese scholars’ understanding of the movement through a
study of their writings and Japanese journals, in particular, Art Theatre and
Film Art (Eiga Geijutsu). Added to this are the filmmakers’ own accounts
of their theories of filmmaking. By focusing on the challenge this film
movement made to mainstream representations and through an analysis
of visual style, it is intended to locate films produced by key directors
linked to the movement through the ATG from within the field of the
economy of film production and criticism in 1960s and 1970s Japan.
I shall also consider the ‘dispositions’ of this generation of filmmakers
within the wider social economy of a period of often violent political
protest. Therefore, this book is concerned to facilitate an understanding
of not only the socio-political background that contributed to the consti-
tution of the movement, but to provide an analysis of the distinctive
stylistic challenge these filmmakers posed to the accepted grammar of
mainstream studio productions and, by extension, their heretical reap-
praisal of received historical ‘fact’ and accepted social morality in 1960s
and 1970s Japan.
A Dialectic of Positions and Dispositions

The opposition between the ‘commercial’ and ‘non-commercial’ reappears
everywhere. It is a generative principle of most of the judgements which,
in the theatre, cinema, painting or literature, claim to establish the

frontier between what is and what is not art, i.e. in practice, between
‘bourgeois’ art and ‘intellectual’ art, between ‘traditional’ and ‘avant-garde’
art . . . (Bourdieu 2004: 82)
After all, film directors are like prostitutes under a bridge, hiding their faces
and calling customers. (Ozu Yasujirō quoted in Yoshida 2003: 1–2, trans-
lated by Daisuke Miyao and Kyoko Hirano; also in Yoshida 1971: 30)
In A New History of Japanese Cinema (2006), I argued that the relation-

ship between filmmakers, their films and spectators is mediated through
the socio-political and economic contexts in which films are produced and
consumed. This, I suggested, is due to cinema’s status as part of a social
system of audiovisual communications which, during the last century, has
transformed the way we represent and understand our social relations.
Therefore, as with other systems of representation (e.g. language), cinema
is a dynamic and not a determinist field. If we accept cinema’s status
as one component of a complex cultural system of audiovisual communi-
cation, any study of a cinema within a national context should not ignore
the socio-political and economic conditions that at times impact on practice,
independent of human consciousness. Historically, in the Japanese example,
the cinematic techniques of the realist mise-en-scène and its corollaries –
linear narrative and continuity editing as developed in the ‘classical’ Western
cinematic traditions – exist as a priori that were, with the importation of
cinema in the late nineteenth century, adopted and adapted to pre-modern
Japanese storytelling paradigms. This, I stress, was an interactive and
not an externally imposed process. The role of the benshi/katsuben as
‘photo-interpreter’ in the exposition of the film experience for Japanese
cinema-goers in the early nineteenth century provides just one illustrative
example of this process of accretion.8 Therefore, within the national
context, cinema as a form of symbolic cultural practice should be under-
stood as both constituting of and constituted by the society in which it is
produced and consumed. However, this still leaves open the question of
human agency and the impact of ‘disposition’ on the creative processes.
The subjective position of the filmmaker as agent working within the field
of film production needs to be maintained, perhaps nowhere more so than
when considering the works of independent filmmakers involved in avant-
garde movements. But equally, there is a need to avoid the excesses of
idealism associated with the concept of the filmmaker as auteur which still
Introduction 5
informs many contemporary English language commentaries on Japanese

cinema (Turim 1998; Yoshimoto 2000; Le Fanu 2005; and Gerow 2007).
In short, I am suggesting that an analysis of filmmakers and their works
should be grounded in an historical analysis of the objective social
relations and cultural practices out of which they emerged.
Bourdieu in The Field of Cultural Production provides a theoretical
model through which to locate the filmmaker within both the contexts
of the field of film production and the wider society of class-defined
distinctions of ‘taste’. Bourdieu contends that our understanding of what
constitutes ‘art’ within a given society rests on a distinction between
the production of works for ‘restricted’ consumption and that produced
for the ‘public at large’. What he so admirably demonstrates is that works
produced for a ‘restricted’ audience, ‘high’ culture, are predicated on
a disavowal of economic profit in favour of ‘symbolic capital’, which,
despite ultimately retranslating into economic profit, defines a class of
producers and consumers. As he explains:
In contrast to the field of large-scale cultural production, which submits

to the laws of competition for the conquest of the largest possible market,
the field of restricted production tends to develop its own criteria for the
evaluation of its products, thus achieving the truly cultural recognition
accorded by the peer group whose members are both privileged clients
and competitors. (Bourdieu 2004: 115)
This is perhaps best understood as expressing the extreme position of the

two polarities of what is culturally constituted under the labels ‘high’ and
‘low’ (or popular) culture. Within this context, ‘art house’ cinema, which
has historically defined and distinguished itself in opposition to its com-
mercial counterpart, aspires to ‘high’ culture status, but in reality occupies
an often indeterminate position between these two polarities; its position
being determined within a given historical frame by various interrelated and
interested factions or ‘positions’ within the field of cultural production –
filmmakers, critics and journals, the audience by which the films and the
journals are appropriated,9 and, increasingly, I would include academia.
Through these often competing factions an ‘aesthetics of taste’ is defined,
challenged and redefined through a continual process of ‘struggle’ by
which certain films, filmmakers or film movements are at a particular his-
torical moment ‘consecrated’, and other films, filmmakers or movements
are relegated either to oblivion (becoming dated) or to the status of
‘classic’. Equally, the monopoly authority of the critic, or increasingly the

academic, to pronounce and participate in these rituals of ‘consecration’
has continually to be relegitimated.
As Perkins (1974) demonstrates, in the 1950s, French film critics, in
an attempt to elevate cinema to the level of ‘high’ culture, established an
‘aesthetics of taste’ based on the auteur theory. As the name accorded to
this theory suggests, classical notions of ‘art’ based on, what Bourdieu
describes as, the ‘charismatic image of the artistic activity as pure,
disinterested creation by an isolated artist’, underpinned the analytical
approach dictated by this theory. More recently, a superficial reading of
Deleuze’s studies as a hierarchical taxonomy of cinematic stylistic signs,
Cinema I: Movement-Image and Cinema II: Time-Image, further perpetu-
ates and sanctifies these distinctions between ‘art house’ and ‘commercial’
cinema.10 However this study, while accepting Deleuze’s premise that World
War II marked a point of departure from the predominantly sensory-motor
schema of the ‘movement-image’ of ‘classical’ cinema to a subjective ‘time-
image’ of European ‘art house’ cinema, argues that in Japan this shift
marked at the representational level a ‘crisis of truth’ precipitated by the
devastation and angst of defeat. Extending this argument temporally, this
study also argues that in Japan an even greater crisis of representation
accompanied the betrayals of democracy evident in the early 1950s and
that this was fundamental to re-presentations of Japanese modern history
by avant-garde filmmakers through, what both the Japanese avant-garde
filmmaker and theorist Yoshida Yoshishige and Deleuze identified as the
subjectivity and uncertainties of the Bergsonian derived ‘time-image’.
Institutionally, the ATG facilitated this cross-fertilization as Japanese
intellectuals looked to Europe as an alternative to the ubiquitous presence
of American popular culture accompanying the occupation.
The Japanese ATG became one of the principal vehicles through which
the ideal of an ‘aesthetics of taste’ was imported from Europe in the early
1960s into Japan. In an article published in the Japanese journal Film
Art (Eiga Geijutsu) in January 1962 to announce the inauguration of the
company, one of the primary instigators, Kawakita Kashiko (1908–1993),
sets out its principal aims. It is clear from this article that, after extensive
travels in Europe and the United States, she identified a perceived need
to introduce an alternative ‘art house’ cinema into Japan to counter what
was inherently understood to be an inferior commercial cinema controlled
by the five major studios, Shōchiku, Nikkatsu, Tōei, Daiei and Tōhō. The
language used in the article to define the types of films to be selected by
Introduction 7
ATG, ‘superior films’ (yūshū eiga) and the emphasis on ‘non-commercialism’

(hishōgyōshugi), clearly represents an attempt to locate ATG within the
‘high’ art classification of cultural ‘taste’ and is evidenced by the first film
selected for release in April 1962, the Polish film Mother Joan of the
Angels (Matka Joanna od aniolow) directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz 1961.
The establishment of an ‘aesthetics of taste’ as a remit for ATG extended
to Kawakita’s description of the foreign ‘art house’ cinemas she visited,
and which were to be emulated in the décor and ambience of the ATG
cinemas. ‘[T]here are many art house cinemas that seat less than five
hundred. The reason for this is that they are not aiming at the masses,
their objective is to screen mainly foreign, artistic [geijutsuteki] films’
(Kawakita 1962: 47).
The Kawakita family had a long association with European cinema
dating back to the early 1930s when Kawakita Nagamasa ran the Tōwa
Shōji film importation and distribution company which specialized in
European, particularly German, films. Kawakita Nagamasa took over this
role as principal European film importer from Mori Iwao. Continuing
this family connection, Mori Iwao who was to be reinstated in the early
1950s as head of the Tōhō Studios, after being purged by the occupation
authorities as part of their policy to remove from public life influential
business leaders who supported the war, went on to become the principal
backer of the ATG, with a 60-per cent share holding.
Kawakita Kashiko links the emergence of ‘art house’ cinema in Europe
to a new sense of internationalization that was a direct response to World
War II; she connects this to troop movements during the war and the often
forced mass migration of populations in the immediate post-war period.
Furthermore, she argues that the increase in tourism, due to advances in
commercial aviation, had also contributed to a sense of internationaliza-
tion. The filmmaker Hani Susumu (1928–), also writing in Film Art after
his return from Europe in the early 1960s, similarly comments on this
trend when he observes that ‘There is definitely a world trend in the
separation of the commercial cinema from art cinema’ (Hani 1963: 25).
On an industry level, Kawakita suggests that audiences had become tired
of Hollywood-style epic productions (here she cites Ben Hur 1959) and
were seeking alternatives. Equally, the increase in interest in international
film festivals also helped engender a new sense of internationalization
(globalization in contemporary parlance). ATG was to be Japan’s contribu-
tion to this trend and part of the project, as far as Kawakita Kashiko was
concerned, was to educate Japanese audiences. In the article, Kawakita
lists an extensive 14-point manifesto which alludes to this educational role

of the company. Through a discussion of the spacing and number of seats
in theatres, she incorporates a discussion of cinema etiquette making it
clear that spectators will be discouraged from entering a screening once
the programme had begun and that standing during screenings would not
be permitted. She continues to elaborate on the educational role of the
enterprise when she announces the inauguration of the journal, Art Theatre,
and that exhibitions were to be held in theatre lobbies. In all these points,
the cinemas of the ‘commercial’ chains form the negative binary against
which ATG theatres are defined. Where ‘commercial’ cinemas aim to
maximize seating, the main Tokyo, Shinjuku ATG venue was remodelled
and the seating capacity reduced from 600 to 400 seats. The rules governing
when a person may enter the cinema and the prohibition on standing were
all in opposition to the big ‘commercial’ cinemas which permitted standing
in the aisles and a rush for seats at the programme changeover. In terms of
films to be screened, point 6 simply states: ‘Publicized films (kōkoku eiga)
will not be screened’ (Kawakita 1962: 49).
It is clear from Kawakita’s article that, contained within the ethos of
the company, was an agenda linked to the promotion of a specific ‘aesthetics
of taste’ predicated on a disavowal of the economic imperative that drove
the ‘commercial’ cinema. Historically, the establishment of an ‘aesthetics
of taste’ within film criticism has become a doxa founded on a cultural
class position which has had the effect of limiting critical discourse to a
(cultured) individual’s response to a specific film or director’s oeuvre and
continues to inform much writing on ‘World Cinema’ today (Kurosawa
Akira, Ozu Yasujirō, Abbas Kiarostami and Satyajit Ray are all directors
regularly subjected to this critique). This critical paradigm, as Perkins
explains, ‘not only fails to provide a coherent basis for discussion of par-
ticular films but actively obstructs understanding of cinema’ (Perkins 1974:
11). Equally, and for this study more importantly, this critical position has
historically underpinned the distinctions in the field of film production and
reception between the ‘commercial’ and ‘art house’ cinemas.
Symbolic, and not economic capital, was to ostensibly define the
success of ATG. Ultimately this anti-commercial ethos came to define
a visual-style, built around, what I shall refer to as an ‘aesthetics of
economy’ predicated on the concept of the film director as auteur and, as
subsequent chapters will demonstrate, it was this ‘aesthetics of economy’
that provided a determining framework that stylistically links many of the
Introduction 9
principal productions of Japan’s 1960s avant-garde filmmakers – artistic

autonomy of the filmmaker, black and white film stock, the employment
of theatre as distinct from cinema actors and film scores composed by
musicians from the experimental classical traditions.
There is, however, an inherent contradiction within this project as
ATG, despite its disavowal of the economic, did function as an economi-
cally viable company, rapidly expanding from distribution into financing
independent film production. Financially underpinned by the Tōhō Studios,
its formation also represented an acknowledgement of the changing
economic realities of the Japanese market and was clearly designed to tap
into a new audience – a university-educated, politically conscious, middle-
class elite. The year 1958 represented the height of box-office takings in
Japan after which the major studios began to experience a steady and
irreversible decline. As the studios reduced their production staff base,
they increasingly sought independent films to fill the booking schedules
for their cinema chains. Therefore, despite walking out of the Shōchiku
Studios in 1960 after the acrimonious withdrawal from cinemas of his film
Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon yoru to kiri), Ōshima Nagisa was able
to release Pleasures of the Flesh (Etsuraku) in 1965, Violence at
Noon (Hakuchū no tōrima) in 1966, Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
(Muri shinjū Nihon no natsu) in 1967 and The Three Resurrected Drunk-
ards (Kaette kita yopparai) in 1968, through the Shōchiku cinema
chain. Reportedly, after the closure of the Kyoto production studios, the
Shōchiku Ōfuna [Tokyo] Studios reduced their production rate from
four films a month to 2.5 films, the balance being made up through
independent films.
In terms of the audience, ATG with its main cinema located in the
heart of one of Tokyo’s largest entertainment districts, Shinjuku, tapped
into an aspiring intellectual youth market. In the second half of the 1960s,
Shinjuku was the centre of alternative live theatre and many avant-
garde actors, directors and musicians became involved in collaborative
filmmaking ventures through ATG – the actor turned director Terayama
Shūji (1935–1983) and the composer Takemitsu Tōru (1930–1996) are
just two examples. Shinjuku was also the geographical centre of much
student protest.
As Bourdieu demonstrates, within the field of a given art form, ‘symbolic

capital’ is consecrated through a series of structural relationships between
artists, other artists, agents, critics and, I would add, academia. Historically,
the auteur theory has been central in consecrating Japanese filmmakers
within the pantheon of ‘art house’ cinema directors as, with few exceptions,
Western and many Japanese film critics and historians have appropriated
the auteur position when writing on Japanese cinema. The avant-garde
movement of the 1960s, as a subfield of ‘art house’ cinema, cultivated a
select clientele and was supported through a system of intermediary agents
(specifically the distribution/production company ATG and the journals
Art Theatre and Film Art) and was founded upon a complex system of
‘symbolic capital’ which actively cultivated the cult of the auteur, while
disavowing economic profit through its apparent rejection of the major
commercial studios. It is only through an understanding of these relation-
ships within the field of film production, reception and criticism in Japan
in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that we can hope to reach an understanding
of the historical significance of the movement. As Bourdieu further
explains, the advantage in defining the artistic field as inseparably ‘a field
of positions and a field of position takings we also escape from the usual
dilemma of internal (tautegorical) reading of the work (taken in isolation
or within the system of work to which it belongs) and external (allegorical)
analysis’ (2004: 34).
In the essay ‘Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Works’, Bourdieu
suggests that within the fields of the production of ‘high’ art, the inherent
struggle between the new and the old, traditional and avant-garde, incurs
a process of ‘autonomization’. That is, a continual process of debate
around, and internalization of, the values upon which the criteria of
consecration and those with authority to consecrate are defined and deter-
mined. This process, Bourdieu suggests, ensures the development of an
internal historicity that insulates the field from ‘external’ history.
Paradoxically, in those fields which are the site of permanent revolution,

the avant-garde producers are determined by the past even in their
innovations which aim to go beyond it, and which are inscribed, as in
the original matrix, in the space of possibles, which is immanent in the
field itself. What happens in the field is more and more dependent on the
specific history of the field, and more and more independent of external
history. (Bourdieu 2004: 188, emphasis in the original)
Closely linked to the notion of ‘possibles’ within the field of production

is the concept of ‘disposition’, as it is the disposition of the filmmaker or
Introduction 11
artist as active agent which reacts against the historicity of the field to
create the ‘new’ or avant-garde. It is through filmmakers’ theoretical and
critical writings that disposition becomes accessible as an object of
public analysis.
While one concedes Bourdieu’s point, that the ‘possibles’ for the
avant-garde are determined by the internal historicity of the field, in the
Japanese example of the cinema of the 1960s, due to the historical links
between the commercial studio-produced cinema and the State during the
1930s and early 1940s, and the effective restructuring and control over
the cinema industry exerted by the US-led occupation forces, ‘external
history’ became one of the principal areas of contested terrain in films of
the movement. The Japanese example illustrates how external politics and
the poetics of culture merged in the 1960s and 1970s to challenge the
dominant visual representations of the commercial cinema and thus
communicate political dissent. Therefore, conscious of Bourdieu’s warning,
that ‘the relative autonomy of the field is more completely achieved in
works owing their formal properties and their value only to the structure,
thus to the history of the field, further disqualifying interpretations which,
through a short circuit, go directly from what happens in the world to what
happens in the field’ (Bourdieu 2004: 188, emphasis in the original), in its
broadest terms, this study attempts an analysis of the Japanese avant-garde
film movement of the 1960s and 1970s on two imbricated levels, first,
against the internal historicity of the field of filmmaking practice, and
secondly, from the external forces out of which the field of filmmaking
practice was constituted in the 1960s and 1970s.
This volume opens with an expository chapter that considers the
relationship between cinema and philosophy, in particular, the influence
of post-war Europe through the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, the impact
of Italian neo-realism, and the films of Alain Resnais on the theories of
filmmaking propounded by Yoshida Yoshishige and Ōshima Nagisa. This
survey of Japanese literature is contextualized within the politics of defeat,
occupation and often violent public protest, as it is my contention that the
Japanese avant-garde was a specific response to both a ‘crisis of truth’ that
emerged in the wake of World War II, and, perhaps more significantly, the
subsequent betrayal of the promises of ‘democratic’ reforms under the
exigencies of American Cold War foreign policy.
The subsequent chapter is organized around the following themes, the
sensual imperative of history as experienced as layers of ‘time’ imbricated
in the individual’s subjectivity, and not, as in mainstream cinema, a collec-
tive national memory. Here I focus on a discussion of representations of

World War II. Chapter 3 takes up the following themes: sexuality and
‘perversion’ as expressions of individual desire linked to notions of
‘subjectivity’ (shutaisei). Ironically, this desiring subjectivity was sought
in a pre-modern ‘native’ sensibility that existed prior to Western influence.
These depictions directly challenged the Neo-Confucian family structure
as both a private and political institution. Here I draw on the films of
Imamura Shōhei, developing the discussion around the depiction of
the sexualized woman. Secondly, chapter 3 considers the debate carried
out in the film journal Film Art (Eiga Geijutsu) on what constitutes the
‘erotic’ and what constitutes ‘obscenity’ which coalesced around the
banning of the film Black Snow (Kuroi yuki) in 1965 and was subsequently
carried over in the discussions that surrounded the court case involving
the publication of the screenplay, complete with still photographs, from
Ōshima Nagisa’s 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no koriida).
Then follows a chapter which examines the historical legacies of the avant-
garde movement’s challenge to ‘realism’ through a study of documentary
film and performance. This chapter will trace, within Imamura’s oeuvre
and beyond in the works of Hara Kazuo (1945–), a trajectory from the
‘realist’ authenticating aesthetic of the fiction film Insect Woman (Nippon
konchūki 1963) through to the reflexive documentary techniques of the
performative in films such as A Man Vanishes (Ningen jōhatsu 1967),
The Post-War History of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon sengoshi
madamu Onboro no seikatsu 1970) and the series of documentary films
made for television between 1971 and 1975 in which Imamura searches,
in various parts of Asia, for former Japanese soldiers and prostitutes who
did not return to Japan after the war.
Due to the complex nature of the topic and the enormous amount of
Japanese source materials available, the style is essayistic focusing on
themes and topics, rather than an attempt at a definitive ‘pure gaze’ which
would only contribute to the further consecration of the movement. In this
respect, as a writer imbedded in the institutionalism of academia, my
position is problematic, and I again turn to Bourdieu in full consciousness
of my position within the field:
Every critical affirmation contains, on the one hand, a recognition of

the value of the work which occasions it, which is thus designated as
Introduction 13
a worthy object of legitimate discourse . . . and on the other hand, an

affirmation of its own legitimacy. All critics declare not only their
judgement of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it
and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of
legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the
production of value of the work of art. (Bourdieu 2004: 36)
Film and Philosophy: Towards
C HAPTER
HAP TE R
1
a Cinema of Praxis
For us, doing reveals being. Each gesture traces out new forms on the
earth. Each technique, each tool, is a way that opens upon the world;
things have as many aspects as there are ways of using them. We are
no longer with those who want to possess the world, but with those
who want to change it, and it is to the very plan of changing it
that it reveals the secrets of its being. (Sartre 2005: 183, emphasis in
the original)
To our way of thinking, film is something with which you strike at

society, it is something that has a tense relationship with society, in the
sense that the subjective world of the filmmaker is pitted against society.
However, society gets caught up in a way of thinking in which people
want to recreate film as total reality and completely natural. There is
an artistic conservatism and a political conservatism. We fight against
this . . . because for us shooting a film is fighting. (Ōshima quoted in a
combined interview with Yoshida in Best of Kinema Junpō vol. I, 1950–
1966, 1994: 948)
I
f the founding of the distribution/production company ATG
represented, at the institutional level, an attempt to bring
Japanese film-viewing tastes into line with international trends,
on another level, it was also an acknowledgement of the diversification
of patterns of leisure and consumption within 1960s Japanese society.
Furthermore, it was intimately linked to changing notions of ‘subjectivity’,
manifest in popular culture in the ‘sun tribe’ (taiyōzoku) youth subculture
among other things. The hedonistic ‘sun tribe’ generation represented a
‘nihilist’, anti-bourgeois rebellion against the wartime parent generation
who, through concepts of post-war economic reconstruction, remained
steeped in the cycles of the utilitarian work ethic of means and ends and
ends and means. Middle-class youth of the post-defeat, occupation gen-
eration had, in contrast, by the late 1950s, learnt the art of self-definition
through consumption based on desire and this was reflected on mainstream
— 15 —
cinema screens in the star persona of Ishihara Yūjirō (1934–1987). The

erotically charged ‘kiss’ scene between Ishihara and Kitahara Mie (1933–)
in the 1956 film Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu) and the subsequent moral
panic marked the historical moment.
In philosophical debates, Takakuwa Sumio argues that post-war
political theories of ‘individual autonomy’ (shutaiseiron) were ‘products
of the era of disintegration’. With defeat the ideologies of Imperial Japan
collapsed resulting in an extreme disillusionment with the political and
social systems upon which the populous had formerly relied. Sakaguchi
Ango (1906–1955) with the publication of his influential essay ‘Discourse
on Decadence’ (Darakuron) and the proponents of the ‘literature of the
flesh’ school (nikutai bungaku), such as Tamura Taijirō (1911–1983)
writing in the latter half of the 1940s, questioned all political beliefs and
institutions looking for alternative ‘truths’ in the subjective spheres of
bodily desire. In wartime, the individual had been compelled to suppress
private desires in favour of the collective effort. The Special Attack Forces,
formed in the last desperate months of the war and commonly known
as the kamikaze forces, were the ultimate iconic expression of this confla-
tion of public duty and the private through sacrifice. Their image was
reinscribed into popular post-war discourses in the 1950s1 as emblematic
of a consciousness in keeping with the imperatives of reconstruction.
One outcome was a popular youth backlash through the ‘sun tribe’,
while on another level, Japan’s post-war intellectual youth embraced
Sartrean-derived existentialism as a philosophy through which to under-
stand the relationship of the individual to the collective. As Koschmann
explains:
After defeat, desire was widespread for the restoration of shutaisei, now
understood as equivalent to jishusei, or autonomy. However, from the
perspective of the individual, the wave of democratization that swept
through postwar society amounted to merely another version of ‘social-
ization’ that had occurred before and during the war . . . Public priorities
were dominant, and politics was so pervasive as to submerge the indi-
vidual. As a result, the desperate urge to maintain personal integrity in
opposition to social forces was expressed in the desire for shutaisei . . .
[People] had come to hate all social forces and institutions, and this
hatred became the basis for a negative concept of individuality. Here,
then, was the social-psychological origin of the postwar move toward
existentialism and the ideals of subjective freedom and autonomy.
(Koschmann 1996: 137)
Film and Philosophy 17
Within mainstream political discourse, conceptions of shutaisei were

promoted through political engagement in democratic processes as the
route to individuation, while in mainstream cinema, desire, expressed
through romance and consumption, and from the 1960s through soft-core
pornography, became the ultimate definition of the individual.2
Economic trends, within the film industry linked to this popular
explosion in youth culture along with the cultural aspirations of ATG in
the 1960s, combined to provide structural opportunities for the rapid
promotion of young filmmakers to full directorial status. Historically,
within the monopolistic society of the major studios a rigid hierarchical
apprenticeship system had been observed. However, with the explosion of
the Nikkatsu Studio’s hedonistic youth film genre based on the ‘sun tribe’
generation, so named after the title of the 1956 film Season of the Sun
(Taiyō no kisetsu) which was based on the popular novel of the same
title by Ishihara Shintarō (1932–), the Shōchiku Studio, in an attempt to
capitalize on the phenomenon, broke with tradition and promoted the then
youthful Ōshima Nagisa (1932–) and Yoshida (Kijū) Yoshishige (1933–)
to full directorial status.
Despite Ōshima’s ignominious departure from the studio after the
acrimony over the withdrawal from Shōchiku cinemas of his 1960 film
Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri), more opportunities for
young filmmakers were increasingly opening up in the industry through-
out the 1960s. Many of these filmmakers, themselves university graduates,
had close links with left-wing student organizations and sought through
cinema to challenge the politics of conservatism and the accepted grammar
of ‘visual-style’ of the major studios. All of the main commercial studios,
with the exception of the Tōei Studios, which began operations in the late
1940s being founded by filmmakers formerly employed by the Manchurian
Motion Picture Association (Man’ei), had returned to prominence under
the auspices of the US-led occupation forces.
In this sense, and to follow Bourdieu’s theoretical paradigm, this
chapter focuses on filmmakers’ ‘dispositions’ as a dominant creative
force within independent film production. This trend was reinforced by
changing social, demographic and economic conditions capitalized on
by ATG and other critical print media (Art Theatre and Film Art/Eiga
Geijutsu) which advanced the concept of the auteur as a marketing
strategy for ‘art house’ films. This chapter, drawing on the theoretical
and critical writings of Yoshida Yoshishige and Ōshima Nagisa, aims to
reach an understanding of the politics, philosophies and aspirations that
underpinned these filmmakers’ conceptions of ‘visual-style’ and narrative

while placing them within a particular European-derived philosophical
world-view with which they associated.
French intellectual thought offered the Japanese educated classes alternative

political philosophies to the American-derived culture of consumption
propagated by the major film studios in compliance with directives issued
by the Civil Information Section (the propaganda wing of the US-led
occupation forces controlling the media), while Italy, through the films of
the neo-realist movement, offered the possibilities of alternative visual
codes through which to re-present the new post-war experiential reality of
people’s lives. As Yoshida explains, ‘Post-war Italian film, while rightly
criticizing films made in the classical way, made rapid progress.’ He con-
tinues, the misery of the last war led to ‘the stripping away of the veil of
affectation and the destruction of the classical image of man as perfect’
(Yoshida [1960] 2006: 49).
On a concrete level, the post-war austerities experienced by ordinary
French and Italian people had resonances within Japan, as was the case
with the inevitable burgeoning of a vibrant black market with all its con-
notations for the institutionalization of crime and corruption. Occupation
by foreign forces provided another point of convergence as did the lega-
cies associated with ideologically divided populations: in the French and
Italian examples, divisions between those who supported the Resistance
and those who supported Fascism, and in the Japanese example, those who
supported the military government and left-leaning pacifist orientated fac-
tions, many of which had ties with the Communist Party. The international
insecurity associated with US imperial ambitions in Korea, Vietnam and
related to the Cold War also provided important points of empathy.
In the immediate post-defeat period, self-reflection and the race to
institutionalize particular memories as official histories became part of the
contested terrain of political discourse (both linguistic and visual) in all
three countries. In Italy, Rossellini’s early films, Rome, Open City (Roma,
città aperta) 1945 and Paisà 1946, performed an important role in cement-
ing the legacies of the Italian Resistance and the Church as dominant
anti-Fascist forces. Japanese directors, such as Kurosawa Akira (1910–
1998), similarly sought cultural heroes of resistance upon which to base
their characters. No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi) 1946
draws loosely on the biographical details of Ozaki Hotsumi (1901–1944),
the China expert, suspected member of the Comintern and the only person
to be executed in Japan for treason during the war, and Takikawa Yukitoki
(1891–1962) the Kyoto University academic dismissed because of his
political views. Marcel Ophuls’ ‘chronicle of a French city under German
occupation and its aftermath’, The Sorrow and the Pity (Le chagrin et la
pitié) 1969, is indicative of the French avant-garde’s attempts, post-May
1968, to rewrite the official historiography, first propagated under the post-
war Gaullist regime. Similarly, a desire to challenge popular histories, as
perpetuated through mainstream cinema’s adaptation of the social realist
mise-en-scène and melodramatic narrative paradigms, formed one of the
dominant planks of the 1960s Japanese avant-garde; Okamoto Kihachi’s
Human Bullet (Nikudan) 1968 challenges the post-war iconographic image
of the Special Attack Forces (kamikaze) and Yoshida Yoshishige’s Eros +
Massacre (Erosu + gyakusatsu) 1970 rewrites the biography of the Taishō
political anarchist Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923) in terms of contemporary
1960s concepts of free love.
Yoshida Yoshishige, writing of his early reminiscences of cinema as a
boy in occupied Japan, contrasts the life styles depicted on cinema screens
with the burnt-out buildings in which the makeshift cinemas were housed
and concludes that the images of Rome depicted in Vittorio De Sica’s
Shoeshine (Sciuscia) 1946 and Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) 1948
were much closer to those of burnt-out Tokyo than the Hollywood films
imported in great numbers by the occupation forces. Stating that most of
the films he saw at that time were from Hollywood and, he recollects,
starred Greer Garson and Ingrid Bergman, he continues:
When I think back on it now, these films formed one of the links in
General Headquarter’s occupation policy, to this extent they were propa-
ganda films (kokusaku eiga); for me, whose austere days passed in the
thronging black-market and beneath gloomy lights, the things that
appeared on the screen in front of me – the snow white walls, the thick
garden lawns, chandeliers, electric refrigerators, and the abundance
of food and canned goods – all of these things that engendered a com-
fortable daily life, it was the ultimate dream and as such I was happy.
I did not just watch these films; inevitably, I envied the world the films
reflected. (Yoshida 1971: 21)
Given the inappropriateness of the ‘dream-like’ quality of Hollywood’s

glamour and romance to the experiential realities of post-defeat Japan,
Europe, as Slaymaker suggests, offered alternative models for coming to
terms ‘with the war years of complicity and weakness, of preserving

the past while moving into the future’ (Slaymaker 2002: 4). Jean-Paul
Sartre, who visited Japan in 1966 with Simone de Beauvoir and whose
translated novel Nausea3 was in the Japanese top ten best-seller list for
1946, provided through existentialism a practical philosophy of action
through which Japanese intellectuals could change society. In fact Yoshida
cites the impact Sartre’s Nausea exerted on him as the reason for choosing
French Studies as his major when he entered Tokyo University (Yoshida
2006: 423).4 In terms of many of the filmmakers associated with the
cinematic avant-garde of the 1960s, existentialism fed into a notion of
cinema as praxis.
In an interview with Yoshida and Ōshima Nagisa published in a 1960
edition of the journal Kinema Junpō, when questioned on their motivation
for entering the commercial world of film production, Ōshima, who was a
graduate from the Law Department of Kyoto University, responds:
In my case, to put it simply, it was by chance that I entered a film

company. However, later when I thought about it, is it not the case that
film as a medium is the best means to fill the gap between the populace
(taishyū) and intellectual classes? We [Ōshima and Yoshida] were both
involved in the student movement, no matter how much time passes, our
way of thinking will not fall into line with the thinking of society; we
will always be angry . . . For us, making films is one form of action
(hitotsu no kōi). It is not the case that we make a film out of something
as a product. In the case of filmmaking, I think of it as a form of action
for society. (Best of Kinema Junpō vol. I, 1950–1966, 1994: 948)5
From their writings, it is clear that Ōshima and Yoshida saw cinema as
part of a didactic project addressed to the post-defeat generation. Literature,
in Sartre’s writing, but cinema in Ōshima’s and Yoshida’s terms, should
provoke people to change society. It should not act as palliative encouraging
men in a sense of powerlessness. The theme of ‘victimization conscious-
ness’ (higaisha ishiki), central to mainstream Japanese post-defeat war-retro
genres, was to be challenged through the visual contextualization of the
existential project. Individual freedom, in the existential conceptualization
presented by Sartre in What is Literature? ([1948] 2005), is dependent;
one man’s freedom depends on another man’s freedom. Society has to
be free from exploitation and oppression for human freedom to flourish.
Within this conceptualization, individual freedom involves the transcendence
of a given context and not, as with the ‘victimization’ theme, a stoic

resignation to circumstances. These issues of freedom were inherently
caught up in the debates around responsibility, accountability and com-
plicity in relation to ‘war crimes’, and ultimately democratic ideals of
governance. While Slaymaker’s analysis of the reception of Sartre’s
writing in Japan indicates that his literary works were taken up and
linked to the ‘literature of the flesh’ (nikutai bungaku) propounded by the
novelist Tamura Taijirō and the literary philosopher Sakaguchi Ango,6
his existentialist philosophies where embraced by an educated elite. Sartre
and the existentialist project gave Yoshida Yoshishige a philosophical
basis for a cinema of praxis.
Dispositions: ‘Self-Negation’ (Jiko hitei)

In Ozu’s Anti-Cinema,7 first published in Japanese in 1998, Yoshida (Kijū)
Yoshishige applies to Ozu’s oeuvre a phenomenological theoretical8
position regarding visual perception and the camera as a medium for
framing and defining ‘reality’ which, he first expounds in his essays ‘Visual
Anarchy’ (Miru koto no anākizumu) and ‘What is Meant by Cinematic
Methodology?’ (Eiga no hōhōron to wa nanika) published in Japanese
in a collected volume in 1971 (reprinted in 2003 and 2006). As the title
‘Visual Anarchy’ implies, Yoshida is arguing that human vision, in its
physical sense, is not a regulated or structured perceptual faculty, but that
our eyes rove through space alighting temporarily on objects or individuals.
In short, he argues that we do not see things in a totality, but that objects
and actions present themselves to consciousness.9 Yoshida continues
extending the Satrean position to a discussion of the function of the
camera: ‘Camera lenses seem to substitute for human eyes. However, in
reality, they oppose each other. If the function of human eyes can be called
“looking”, the mechanism of the camera lenses can be [called] “the death
of looking”.’ By this Yoshida explains that ‘when we look at the actual
conditions of this world through the camera’s lens, we must deny the
random movements of the human eye and restrain the eye’s constant
movements in order to focus on one point. An image in motion pictures
chooses one particular object from the unlimited space of the world, frames
it, and excludes and ignores all other things as if they did not exist.’ Equally,
one of the primary functions of film editing is to determine duration.
Unlike a photograph which a spectator may contemplate at leisure, the
film spectator’s gaze is circumscribed by both editing and camera

movement. To this effect Yoshida argues that cinema should be considered
an ‘authoritative medium’ (Yoshida 2003: 33–34, translated by Daisuke
Miyao and Kyoko Hirano).
In these passages, Yoshida is arguing against a regulated viewing
position which, as he suggests in the essay ‘What is Meant by Cinematic
Methodology?’, was central to both the ‘classical’ Hollywood continuity
system and the Soviet montage school of cinema elaborated on by Sergei
Eisenstein. He argues that historically:
Although reality is burdensome (omoku) and diverse (tayō), the camera

can cleanly cut it out and fix it on film. And then there is the danger that
our eyes will become enchanted by, and lost in the unarranged disorder
of the fragments of film. In order to escape this pitfall, a methodology of
filmmaking that pursues reality through reason was sought. (Yoshida
1971: 34–35, emphasis mine)
As a reaction against this political containment and structuring of human

perception by imposing ‘reason’ (risei) through editing and montage,
Yoshida emphasizes the image as a composition that, while presenting
itself to the spectator, remains open to question. He clearly links the
development of theories of Soviet montage to the ideals of the Russian
Revolution and the need to contain meaning. Thus he argues: ‘I used the
phrase “reality is burdensome”. I do not mean to propose mischievously
that reality is unknowable, but a fragment cut out from material reality, an
image, it is assumed should be doubted. It might seem extreme, but in the
case of montage theory, this space for doubt is completely concealed by
the reality of the Revolution’ (Yoshida 1971: 35). The Soviet emphasis on
montage left little space for the image, which, Yoshida argues, is the root
(kongen) of cinema. Yoshida and other young filmmakers of his generation
therefore sought to establish a new relationship with the spectator through
visual style and the image. This in effect was predicated on an anti-auteur
position or self-negation (jiko hitei), as Yoshida describes:
Space is a complete sphere that surrounds me; out of this space I select a
frame. This act in itself is the special privilege of the auteur (sakka); the
cut-out image is returned to the auteur as his possession. In most cases,
this is something the auteur takes pride in; conversely for me, it has only
painful significance. (Yoshida 1971: 28)
In what appears to be a complex reworking of Sartre’s 1937 essay

‘The Transcendence of the Ego’ and possibly in light of Roland Barthes’s
1968 essay ‘The Death of the Author’, Yoshida sets out a theory of ‘self-
negation’ or as the article is titled ‘For Films That are Not Mine: The Logic
of Self-Negation’ (Watashi no mono de wa nai eiga: jiko hitei no ronri).
He suggests that, through mise-en-scène the filmmaker, operating within
what we now understand as the ‘classical’ mode of filmmaking, creates
a vocabulary through images which tells the auteur’s particular story. This
process, of course, is masked by modes of narration in which, Yoshida
rightly argues, the spectator colludes. ‘If films continue to be made
following this method’, Yoshida expounds, ‘it is impossible for the film
to transcend the filmmaker himself’.
In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre argues that when a person is
engaged with the world of objects, ‘there is no I in one’s consciousness.
It is only when one stops to reflect on what one was doing, that the
I appears in one’s consciousness, and then not as its subject but as its
object’ (Fullbrook and Fullbrook 2008: 43, emphasis in the original).
Yoshida posits, through a disavowal of the authorial voice of the film-
maker, that the filmmaker, while filmmaking, is consciously reflecting on
his own activities through the process of creation and that his ego comes
into consciousness through this process. As Sartre explains:
[T]here is no I on the unreflected level. When I run after a tram, when

I look at the time, when I become absorbed in the contemplation of
a portrait, there is no I. There is a consciousness of the tram-needing-to-
be-caught, etc., . . . In fact, I am then plunged into the world of objects,
it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousnesses, which present
themselves with values, attractive and repulsive values, but as for me,
I have disappeared, I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me at
this level and this is not the result of some chance, some momentary
failure of attention: it stems from the very structure of consciousness.
(Sartre [1937] 2004: 13, translated by Andrew Brown, emphasis in the
original)
By these examples, Sartre is positing multiple layers of consciousness. In

interaction with objects and actions in the world there is a performative
level of consciousness – ‘the tram-needing-to-be-caught’, while on another
level, there is a reflective level in which the I comes into being as
the object, or as in Sartre’s classic phrase, ‘existence precedes essence’.
Within this creative theory of ‘self-negation’, the director enters into a

new ‘dialogue’ with himself and the spectator through the process of
filmmaking. In Barthes’s literary terms, this is ‘to restore the place of the
reader’, or in Yoshida’s terms, the place of the spectator in the creative
process. As Jameson explains, because
there is nothing for [consciousness] to ‘be’: no essential rock bottom

reality it can finally end up with after it gets done thinking its thoughts
and experiencing its perceptions, nothing there at all when you take
away all the objects seen through its transparency – consciousness is
always consciousness of something. (Jameson 1984: 67, emphasis in
the original)
Yoshida’s constant use of mirrors, glass and water, as transparent and

reflective surfaces, dated from his first independent production A Story
Written in Water (Mizu de kakareta monogatari/Histoire écrite par l’eau)
1965. It similarly positions characters within this reflective transcendence
of consciousness as the I becomes the object which is observed in the
reflection or through the refraction. The smashed mirrors in The Women
in the Mirror (Kagami no onnatachi/Femmes en miroir) 2002, a film
centred on the dual themes of remembering and forgetting, represents
the estranged daughter’s refusal to acknowledge herself consciously as a
descendant of a Hiroshima bomb victim. As such, she chooses to enter
into, and stay within, a state of amnesia. The mirror, as a figure for
consciousness only exists by reflecting its surroundings, just as ‘con-
sciousness is always consciousness of something’.
The concept of the auteur, as applied in marketing strategies, has become

associated with a set of narrative conventions and stylistic motifs that
define the director’s place within the field of filmmaking as a bankable
asset. It is this relationship between the spectator and the industry that
Yoshida sets out to disrupt when he states, ‘In this sense, I want to make
films that have not already been made, films that cannot be made, and
films that are not films’ (Yoshida 1969a: 56). Ōshima makes a similar
point when he talks about the constrictions of the studio system in terms of
barriers/walls:
Once a filmmaker has created a work, the method expressive of his active
involvement must be thought of as part of his external reality. To reuse
a method that has become part of his reality signifies a loss of an involved
attitude and a surrender to reality . . . Thus the filmmaker must always
seek a new tension with reality and constantly negate himself in order
to continue to create a new artistic involvement. (Ōshima 1992: 48,
translated by Dawn Lawson)
Yoshida elaborates, stating that he does not want to make films that have
been preconceived and then presented to the spectator. In other words, he
is concerned to disrupt the ‘cosy’ relationship between studio-produced
films which are made according to presumed spectator expectations, and
spectators who go to films in the safe knowledge of what they are likely
to see. As he states, an exchange takes place between film directors and
spectators of an emotional catharsis that is safe and, drawing an analogy
from Sartre’s short story The Wall, ‘secures people within their own walls’
(jibun jishin no kabe no naka ni tojikomori). In terms similar to Barthes
(1968), he argues that his intention is to go beyond creating a film as a
product shown to a spectator, to the spectator him/herself becoming
the creator. In other words, he is calling for the enfranchisement of the
spectator whereby meaning within a film is constructed from ‘image
fragments’ a posteriori, rather than as with the ‘classical’ cinema a priori.
Thus the concern is shifted from meanings to effect:
This is a new relationship, in other words, a film is no longer a fixed

received entity (jittai), but a free dialogue, a possible exchange, a
conceptual relationship between the filmmaker and the spectator . . .
This means completely turning one’s back on films [as we currently
understand them]. Why? Existing films are stagnant, they are tied and
bound by ideas that overemphasize their entity. (Yoshida 1969a: 56)
In a later conversation with Suwa Nobuhiro published in the journal Eureka

(Yuriika) in 2003, Yoshida reiterates this point by likening images to words,
arguing that both are abstract systems from which individuals create
meanings. He uses the example of the colour ‘red’, which, following
Sartre’s maxim that ‘objects present themselves to consciousness’, some
people will associate with ‘blood’, while others will associate with ‘lips’.
He continues: ‘The word ‘red’ is nothing but an abstraction. We can say
the same thing about cinema. We cannot think of the image of an actor
reflected on the screen, even if he is speaking dialogue, as being reality
(riaritei). An image reflected on a screen does not exist as an actuality/as

real (genjitsu), it is a representation (hyōshō)’ (Yoshida 2003: 91).
Yoshida echoes Sartre’s main character in Nausea, Antoine Roquentin,
when he muses over the sense of distance he experiences when re-reading
what he has just written. ‘I had thought out this sentence, to begin with it
had been a little of myself. Now it had been engraved on the paper, it had
taken sides against me. I no longer recognized it’ (Sartre [1938] 2000: 139,
translated by Robert Baldick). While Sartre’s character comes to this real-
ization by chance, Yoshida actively sought to create a distantiation between
the creator and the created work. Yoshida continues:
My intention has been to destroy the unquestioned relationship between

the creator as someone who shows (miseru) a film and the spectator who
is being shown (miserareru). The relationship between the director as
creator and the film which is created is severed. The created film like a
stranger (tanin no yō ni) looks at me and at the spectator. This equality is
the attraction of cinema. (Yoshida 2003: 92)10
Analytically, in ‘Visual Anarchy’ Yoshida was led to these theories in

part through his reaction against Hollywood films of the occupation era,
illustrated in his discussion of Italian neo-realist films of the late 1940s.
In this analysis, he contrasts his own experiences as a spectator when
he first viewed films directed by Vittorio De Sica and those by Roberto
Rossellini. He suggests:
[T]he ruined space of Tokyo overlay the settings of [De Sica’s] Bicycle
Thieves and Shoeshine, we had lived through the narratives depicted in
these films. To this extent, those pitiable scenes that were reflected on the
screen facing us were our own, our gaze went beyond them, it circulated
and came back to us ourselves and we wept for ourselves. Possibly, due
to De Sica’s heart-warming humanism, these images corresponded with
our reality and we were transformed through catharsis. The act of look-
ing was not an intense encounter with something external; one could say
that we ourselves were reflected in these scenes. (Yoshida 1971: 22)
Of Rossellini’s films he argues these are more detached. De Sica’s

‘heart-warming humanism’ (kokoro atatamaru hyūmanizumu), as the
quotation alludes, encourages an empathetic response to the characters
and their situations which enabled Yoshida to equate the devastation of
Rome with that of Tokyo in the immediate aftermath of defeat in World

War II. Rossellini’s films, in particular Paisà 1946, Yoshida suggests,
although filmed in a documentary-style austerity, are significant as they
deny the spectator a stable viewing position and identification with a
particular position or character is difficult. The scenes unfold in ‘real’ time
devoid of causal explanations. Indeed Yoshida argues that the director’s
own position or voice is absent from the film. In describing his experience
of watching the episode from Paisà as the dead bodies of the partisans are
swept away by the surging current of the swollen river Po, he says:
The auteur is narrating something; he could be expected to cry out in an

uncontrollable voice. Rossellini rejects this. He seems to refuse to com-
municate, to integrate the spectator. With my gaze in an increasing state
of unease it searches for the existence of the auteur. (Yoshida 1971: 22)
Yoshida talks about Rossellini’s detached style as a form of ‘discommu-

nication’, arguing that for a narrative to represent some sort of reality it
should ‘essentially overcome, indeed check and break with, the daily
conceptions of time and space in which we are entwined’. He continues,
‘the eye of the filmmaker should extend beyond his own individual
position and from a broad perspective look at us’ (Yoshida [1960]
2006: 55–56).
In arguing this point, Yoshida in an essay titled ‘In the Present Times
What are We to Assert?’ (Gendai ni nani o shuchō suru ka), contrasts the
narrative theme of the individual standing alone against society, popular in
mainstream Japanese cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, with Rossellini’s
detached approach to the question of the individual’s relationship to society.
The classic ‘tragic hero’ paradigm of Japanese cinema offers a monotheist
conception of events as fate. Man, according to the ‘victimization theme’
of mainstream war-retro films, is powerless to alter the course of his or her
life, environmental and political factors (jōkyō), and not individual choice,
become determinates of behaviour (Imai Tadashi’s Until the Day We Meet
Again [Mata au hi made] 1950, Kinoshita Keisuke’s A Japanese Tragedy
[Nihon no higeki] 1953, and the kamikaze films Beyond the Clouds [Kumo
nagaruru hateni] 1953 directed by Ieki Miyoji and The Sacrifice of the
Human Torpedoes [Ningen gyorai kaiten] 1955 directed by Matsubayashi
Shue). As Yoshida suggests in his 1960 essay ‘The Glory and Misery
of Post-War Films: Narrative and the Destruction of the Subject’: ‘The
anti-war phrase, “I am going to war, when I go to war I shall die”, has
been heard so often in films that it is now devoid of meaning’ (Yoshida

[1960] 2006: 146). ‘For us circumstances (jōkyō) are a barrier (wall/kabe).
Our image, no matter how we look at it, is too static. Beyond this is the
danger that the barrier, inversely converts into an alibi to shore up one’s
subjectivity (shutaisei)’ (Yoshida [1960] 2006: 143).
In stylistic terms, the use of a flashback structure in Japanese main-
stream war-retro films of the 1950s emphasizes the a priori limitations
that frustrate personal choice. The genre convention of beginning in an
‘originary present’ and then merging into flashback of an individual’s
reminiscences establishes a causal teleological progression that places an
origin for the present in a determinant past as in Until the Day We Meet
Again and The Sacrifice of the Human Torpedoes. By contrast, De Sica’s
and Rossellini’s early post-war films eschew any background information;
the characters exist in the present ‘reel/real’ time of the film. As Yoshida
explains through a discussion of Rome Open City, ‘the introduction of
sentiment into the subject of the narrative is refused, while there is a
constant tension between the subject (shutai) and the situation (jōkyō),
it is filmed through the reorganized eye of documentary’ (Yoshida [1960]
2006: 51).
The early films of the ‘sun tribe’ subculture, in particular, Crazed Fruit
(Nakahira Kō 1956) followed by Yoshida’s début production Good for
Nothing (Roku de nashi/Bon à rien 1960) and Ōshima’s Cruel Story of
Youth (Seishun zankoku monogatari 1960), marked a turning point in both
narrative and visual style as these films are founded on a rejection of the
a priorism of the ‘victimization theme’ and the universal point-of-view
inscribed in omniscient narration. Alternatively, these films depict an indi-
vidual’s relationships to the world; a representation, which the spectator,
is permitted to compare to his or her own experiential reality.
Set within a period of emergent affluent consumer society, the films
invite a comparison between the parent generation who, in following the
majority into war without questioning the values imbedded in the Imperial
ideologies of the ‘family state’ (kazoku kokka), and who, in the post-defeat
period, accepted economic affluence as the price for complicity in the
American imperium, made the choice not to choose. These films thus chal-
lenge the parent generation through an existential notion of ‘free choice’.
To borrow from Sartre: ‘For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will
never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific
human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man
is freedom’ (Sartre [1948] 1980: 34, translated by Philip Mairet). As

Higuchi elaborates:
Young people who imitated [Ishihara] Shintarō’s hairstyle and who

posed in the manner of the ‘sun tribe’, as they were indifferent to the war,
the feudal system, and poverty, they did not share the timid victimization
consciousness of the previous generation. In one sense, they turned their
backs on and resisted becoming obsessive, they were not conscious of
their historical subjectivity. They were irritated and dissatisfied by a
society where the enemy is not visible, but in which one becomes lost.
(Higuchi 2002: 28)
The post-war ‘sun tribe’ generation of Crazed Fruit thus broke with
classic narrative and stylistic conventions, and existing in an affluent
middle-class existential mise-en-scène where everything is permitted, they
exercise their freedom to choose through hedonism. They, therefore, mark
a break with the values of the parent generation, as the protagonists in
Crazed Fruit exclaim, while idling away the summer vacation on the
beaches in and around Kamakura.
Card Player 1: We’re just bored.

Haruji: Find something to do.
Card Player 2: Like what?
Ishihara Yūjirō: ‘Something’ isn’t so easy to find. Intellectually high-minded
talk isn’t worth a damn. The words may be pretty, but the ideas are as
flimsy as those fish (looking at the aquarium). Look at them. They are fine
now, but if the water gets dirty or cold they go belly-up (walking towards
the aquarium with a glass in his hand he tips the dark contents into the
water. He continues, in an extreme close-up shot). Fancy words and old
ways don’t cut it now. We need something with a fresh nip to it.
Card Player 1: Listen to our professors, always spouting the same drivel. It
was showy before, but it’s outdated now.
Card Player 2: You know Tachikawa in economics? He said we were the
future captains of industry. You’d think he was narrating a silent movie,
chasing rainbows with the Soviets and Red China next door. And he is
considered a leading thinker.
Ishihara Yūjirō: Look at what the older generation tries to sell us. You find
anything exciting in that?
Card Player 2: I’ve given up trying. We’ll find our own way to live.
In particular, in Paisà and to a lesser extent Rome Open City, Yoshida

argues that Rossellini creates a sense of detachment where the subjective
remains objective thus leaving a space for the spectator to interpret the
unfolding events from the reality of his or her own experiences, and
therefore, the objective is again reinterpreted as the subjective. In under-
standing the implicit appeal to the spectator’s critical judgement inherent
in Rossellini’s films, one is reminded of Bazin’s analogy with the bridge
and the stepping-stones included in his ‘Defence of Rossellini’ published
in 1955:
[T]he cut stones . . . form a bridge. They are perfectly shaped to form an
arch. But the blocks of stone scattered in a river bed are and remain
rocks; their reality as stone is not affected if, jumping from one to
the next, I take advantage of them to cross the river. If they have
provisionally made that use possible for me it is because I have been
able to contribute to the accident of their layout my own touch of
invention, adding the movement which, without changing their nature
or appearance, has given them a provisional meaning and use. (Bazin
quoted in Forgacs et al. 2000: 160, translated by Geoffrey Nowell-
Smith)
The monotheist approach of the ‘victimization theme’ of classical

Japanese cinema, Yoshida asserts, is a mask to conceal the inner conflicts
and concerns of the filmmaker. In Rossellini’s case, Yoshida states, he
transcends his own subjectivity to offer a set of images of a particular
situation. Whereas, Japanese mainstream films interpret the war through
the ‘tragic hero’ narrative structure and thereby fail to confront issues
of responsibility and questions of choice. In both Paisà and Rome Open
City the central issues are, as in Japanese war-retro films, concerned with
the suffering of the common people. However, in Paisà, Rossellini reaches
a level of detachment beyond the simple dichotomies of victim/aggressor
or good/bad of classical cinema by offering two equally weighted points-
of-view of a set of circumstances. More recently, in Roberto Rossellini:
Magician of the Real, Wagstaff makes a similar observation: ‘Making his
characters victims of another character’s ignorance . . . is the procedure
Rossellini uses to import knowledge to the viewer, and it requires of the
viewer both identification with suffering of the victim and the detachment
of the observer’ (Wagstaff 2000: 42, emphasis in the original).
Alain Resnais, Trauma and Filters of Memory

The question is, what can one human being do against another human
being. (From Ōshima’s Night and Fog in Japan 1960)
The image itself is the system of the relationships between its elements,
that is, a set of relationships of time from which the variable present only
flows . . . What is specific to the image, as soon as it is creative, is to
make perceptible, to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be
seen in the represented object and do not allow themselves to be reduced
to the present. (Deleuze [1985] 2000: xii)
Alain Resnais put a lot of time [into making Night and Fog], but he was
successful in creating a film that defeated time. (Noma 1962: 5)
Writing about the French Nouvelle Vague Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (2008)

makes the point that although many of the films were political they were
not linked to an ‘obvious political armature’. Alain Resnais’s subject
matter, while clearly political (the Nazi death camps in Night and Fog
(Nuit et brouillard) 1955 and the atomic bomb in Hiroshima mon amour
1959), Nowell-Smith suggests, is approached through a ‘filter of memory’.
In Night and Fog, the ‘reality’ of Auschwitz, a film intended to mark the
tenth anniversary of the Liberation of the Nazi death camps, is evoked
by the depiction of the ruins through both the spectator’s imaginings of
the events that took place there prompted by the inclusion of iconic photo-
graphs, and an underlying awareness of how trauma recedes, like the
decaying ruins, into the traces of memory and forgetting, finally coming to
rest in sanctioned historiography. Indeed, Satō argues that Alain Resnais
was one of the first filmmakers to look for a new cinematic form that
evoked, through associations in the spectator, imaginings of an incident,
time or place. Noma writing in the documentary film journal Record
(Kiroku) argues that spectators are led to certain inferences and, that,
‘In this way, the person watching [Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog], becomes
aware that these thoughts are originating in them themselves’ (Noma
1962: 5).
With regard to this question of cinematic-style, Nowell-Smith makes
a helpful distinction between the commercial and avant-garde cinemas,
labelling the commercial cinema as ‘inexplicit cinema’: ‘that is to say
one in which the marks of enunciation are suppressed or naturalized and
stories are told which appear to be telling themselves rather than being
developed from a position which the audience can locate and, if necessary,
challenge’. By contrast, he continues, the ‘new cinemas’ of the 1960s ‘told
stories in which the points of enunciation were always in some way and
to some degree explicit’ (Nowell-Smith 2008: 4–5). It is at this level of
visual style, through the exposure of sources of enunciation as human
memory and/or trauma, and the disruption of teleological time, that
differentiates Japanese avant-garde accounts of events and experiences
derived from World War II from the commercial cinema founded on themes
of ‘victimization’ expressed through ‘realist’ (i.e. ‘inexplicit’) conventions.
Within the avant-garde context, memory as a filter of experience is exposed
as a fallible human perceptual faculty and thus challenges the omniscient
masking of ostensible first-person autobiographical accounts of past events
as empirical, and therefore, accredited historiography. In 1950, Kurosawa
Akira (1910–1998) had begun this process with Rashomon as a site of
the multiple recounting of the events of a murder and rape. One can only
speculate that Kurosawa, as part of the war generation combined with the
closeness of the trauma of World War II still too fresh, deflected the themes
of conflicting (fallible) memory in Rashomon onto the ‘warring states’
period of pre-modern Japan. However, by 1960 Ōshima Nagisa, as part of
the first post-war generation of politicized intellectuals, had reinserted
trauma into contemporary themes of betrayal in Night and Fog in Japan.
Within Western commentaries there is a variety of opinion regarding

Ōshima’s last film of 1960 that its title, Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no
yoru to kiri), echoes Alain Resnais’s 1955 iconic documentary Night and
Fog. Turim, links the two films through visual style:
Resnais’s film uses long takes, extended travelling shots of the concen-
tration camp, and extensive voice-over to situate philosophically the
Holocaust within memory. In montage, documentary images of the atroc-
ities confront the viewer with the evidence of what seems unimaginable.
Oshima’s film has entirely different subject matter; the link seems to be
more in the stylistic daring and the visual and voiced confrontational style
Resnais brought to the film essay. (Turim 1998: 52–53)
Desser, by contrast and at a more intuitive level, links the narrative theme
of the two films to a sense of ‘betrayal’ when he states:
If it strikes the Western observer as extreme to compare the horror of the

Nazi extermination camps with the feeling of having been betrayed by
the Old Left, it may be that at bottom it is the sense of betrayal that is
being highlighted in both films. Implicit in Resnais’s films is the utter
failure of European society which could give rise to such monstrous
crimes; explicit in Oshima’s film is the utter failure of liberal-humanism
and communism to bring any substantial changes to Japan, the failure to
prevent the return of feudalistic values and the failure to prevent the
return of imperialistic aims. (Desser 1988: 30–31)
Desser comes close in his analysis, as a sense of ‘betrayal’ is central to

the thematic concerns of both films, however, through visual style Ōshima
also challenges mainstream representations of history and discursively
repositions a political question that arose out of the war crimes trials
and which haunted much of post-defeat society, that of individual
accountability and social obligation11 as expressed in the shutaisei debates
of the post-defeat decade. Noël Burch describes it in the following terms:
‘[W]hat is the relationship between me and the struggle out there?’ Burch
elaborates:
[Ōshima] was led to conceptualize, from his own political experience

and that of his peer group, a dialectical relationship between mass
consciousness and ‘true’ subjectivity. It is dialectical insofar as the ‘truth’
of this subjectivity stems from an awareness that the individual derives
his status from the social context. (Burch 1979: 327)12
Within the narrative context of Ōshima’s Night and Fog in Japan, or as

a more literal rendering of the title as Japan’s Night and Fog alludes
through its echoes of Resnais’s film, the relationship between the individ-
ual and the wider group, or institution, is played out in a discursive struggle
to reposition history through memory (depicted through stylized flash-
backs) within the narrative context of a debate between the Old and the
New Left. The Old Left, which had come into being with intensification
of the Cold War and while violently opposed to the promulgation of the
Subversive Activities Prevention Law (Hakai Katsudō Bōshihō known
as the Habōhō) in July 1952, had proclaimed an anti-imperialist and
nationalist stance. As Koschmann explains:
The Cominform’s excoriation of the JCP’s [Japanese Communist Party]

line on 6 January 1949 greatly reinforced this anti-imperialist tendency
and linked it to a much more aggressive revolutionary policy. Then, with
the outbreak of war in Korea the Occupation initiated the Red purge and
party leaders went underground. By August 1950 the Cominform had

told the party to carry out a ‘general uprising’ in Japan. (Koschmann
1993: 401)
The New Left, which had opposed the renewal of the security treaty
(Nichibei Sōgo Kyōryoku Hoshō Jōyaku) ratified in June 1960, developed
out of a response to international developments: the summit meetings in
Geneva in 1955 encouraged the belief that there was an immanent thaw in
the Cold War, and the following year Khrushchev denounced Stalin. These
developments precipitated a ‘crisis of identity’ in Marxists and ‘laid the
foundations for the anti-JCP New Left’ (Koschmann 1993: 404). In the
course of this debate between the Old and the New Left, Night and Fog in
Japan exposes the homogenizing and totalizing pressures the institution,
in this case the Communist Party, brings to bear on the individual in an
attempt to make him or her conform. As Ōshima states: ‘I thought at
the time [of filming] the main fault was with the central faction of the
Communist Party, now I think it is in communism itself’ (1993: 265). The
underlying judgement of the film being that immoral acts are committed in
a group situation where loyalty to one’s fellows is set apart as the ultimate
virtue. In the face of monolithic opposition (as in wartime and violent
political struggles), this overriding necessity for unity distorts the very
values, such as the autonomy of the individual contained within political
concepts of democracy and freedom that the group espouses.
In the post-defeat era, this theme of the individual versus the group
had a long pedigree in mainstream cinema, particularly, in the case of films
dealing with issues of war crimes13 which are often portrayed through
themes of ‘victimization’. Linked to the critique of these films is the notion
of accountability. If all Japanese were victims of their politicians and
military leaders, they are absolved from accountability. Again it comes
back to the Sartrean conception of the burden of freedom and ‘choice’; not
choosing is still a conscious choice not to choose. Mainstream films had
utilized this dialectical theme of the individual versus the group to explain
both atrocities carried out by individuals during the war (I Want to be
Reborn a Shellfish/Watashi wa kai ni naritai 1959), and to condemn the
Japanese wartime military institutions which, during the 15 years of war,
had increasingly demanded unquestioning loyalty and self-sacrifice
(The Pacific War and the International Tribunal/Daitōa sensō to kokusai
saiban 1959).
Resnais’s Night and Fog, as one Japanese critic writing in the film
journal Record (Kiroku) in 1961 argues, forces the viewer to acknowledge
his or her complacency by confronting audiences with the question: ‘We,
who are trying to enjoy a brief period of peace . . . We have no intention of
looking at our surroundings. We put on an air of having forgotten’ (Kimura
1961: 36). Night and Fog in Japan re-appropriates this thematic motif
and utilizes it to question the role of the individual working within the
monolithic totalizing influences of the Japan Communist Party and the
militant student groups, all of which were pitted against the conservative
US-backed post-war Japanese government at the time of the anti-treaty
struggles of the early 1950s, opposition to the Subversive Activities
Prevention Law, and the later anti-renewal struggles of the late 1950s.
As such, the film is structured both around generational conflicts between
the Old Left and the New Left and between multiple levels of narrated
time. Within both generations, it is the disappearance of a colleague that
provides the narrative trigger through which the group argues out, what
Burch correctly identifies as the ‘dialectical relationship between mass
consciousness and “true” subjectivity’. With regard to the Old Left, the
narrative context reverts through flashbacks to the time a suspected spy
was being held in the students’ dormitory. In terms of the contemporary
late 1950s student movement (the New Left) this same theme is played out
around the disappearance of a student, Kitami, after the fateful night of
15 July 1960 when a female student from Tokyo University died during
the violent anti-treaty renewal demonstration outside the Diet.
The blue tones and deep penetrating fog that characterizes the mise-
en-scène of Ōshima’s Night and Fog in Japan evoke the claustrophobic
nature of the staged wedding ceremony. The use of the long take, or as
Ōshima describes it, ‘one-scene one-cut’ technique, was designed to
heighten the physicality of the tension of what is already a tense narrative
situation – a wedding ceremony where opposing political factions face
each other across the divide between the groom’s and bride’s guests.
As Ōshima explains:
A twofold tension is compelled in the actors and the staff. Compelling

tension in this way is my dramaturgy. I compel tension in everyone. It is
fine to compel tension in one person, but to compel tension in a great
number of people, to increase it by ten fold, that kind of tension is,
I think, what life (seimei) is about. (1993: 296)
Ōshima explains that the ‘one-scene one-cut’ technique, shunned by the

major studios because it left limited room for post-production alterations
and corrections in the editing room, puts greater pressure on the actors to
perform at their peak during the filming, and also similarly, forces the
technical staff to minimize errors during filming. The maintenance of this
level of ‘tension’ on the set, Ōshima suggests, permeated the narrative
with a heightened level of ‘tension’ that would not have been possible had,
for example, montage techniques been applied.
Tayama reviewing Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog in a 1961 article
titled ‘Alain Resnais’s Distrust of Humanity, Night and Fog’ (Alain
Resnais no ningen fushin) argues that the central question of the film is,
Are the people who ran the camps so different from us? He continues,
Resnais ‘does not just criticize Nazism. The acts of cruelty revealed were
carried out by people who, ultimately, are the same as us (ware ware
to onaji kao o shite). It is here, in the fact that people are like this, that
Resnais’s distrust lies’ (Tayama 1961: 64). Furthermore, as the critic
writing in Record argues, the alternation between the past and present,
visualized through the alternation between colour and black and white,
forces the viewer to confront questions of accountability, Resnais ‘does
not demand that we recognize the historical truth of the past. What he
demands, is that we should recognize the present time, and confront the
question of responsibility that each one of us living in the present bears’
(Kimura 1961: 36).
Equally, this question is raised in Ōshima’s Night and Fog in Japan.
Ōshima in this film implies that in contemporary 1950s and 1960s Japan
it is all happening again, the individual is being subsumed into the insti-
tution and being forced to compromise his or her ethical position, under
the auspices of American-led imperial ambition on the one hand, and
the betrayals of the Stalinist Old Left on the other. As Misako states in
her interrogation of the suspected spy: ‘Spy, as a Japanese, don’t you
understand who the enemy of Japan is, don’t you understand that Japan
is being sold out by America (Nihon o Amerika ni utteru)?’ The American
connection is reinforced through references to the Uchinada Incident,
the first major public protest movement against the establishment of
American military bases in Japan. The protest movement continued
through 1952 and 1953 when the practice firing range was finally opened.
It was used to train US troops for their tours of duty on the Korean
peninsular.
The film critic Aochi, writing in Film Art, was particularly moved
by the final scene of Night and Fog in Japan, which he concludes
resolves nothing:
The film does not provide a solution, the Japanese Communist Party, the
so-called Trotskyites of Zengakuren, and the sceptical humanists are on
one hand affirmed and on the other denied. Then in the final scene of
Night and Fog in Japan, the endless speech made by the Party official
continues and is enveloped in the deep white fog that lies between the
trees. This formal speech calling in an orthodox manner for a unity on
the battle fronts of peace and democracy is possibly theoretically correct,
but comes out as empty and lacking in persuasion deepening with the
fog that lies between the trees. This final scene is emblematic of the
weakness of Japan’s reformist resolve and left one with an unbearable
impression. (Aochi 1961: 24)
The political force and efficacy of the film in attacking Japanese

society and confronting contemporary 1960s political institutions can be
measured in the urgency with which the film was withdrawn from cinemas
only four days after its release on the day, 12 October, the socialist politi-
cian Asanuma Inejirō (1898–1960) was assassinated.14 Aochi speculates
that the withdrawal of the film was not, as reported, due to low box-office
takings but for political reasons. There was a rumour that the Head of the
Shōchiku Studios, Ōtani Hiroshi, had been approached by the cabinet
secretary with a request to withdraw the film from public screenings. Why,
as Aochi and Ōshima both question, if it was just a matter of box-office
takings, did the Shōchiku Studios subsequently refuse to re-release the
film to student cinema circles? In terms of Japanese film critics, they were
sharply divided between those who regarded the film as a complete failure
and those, such as Aochi, who were at pains to refute such criticism. Aochi
argues that the reception of the film reflected generational differences, as
those who accused the film of being difficult to understand did not share
Ōshima’s background.
Commenting on Ōshima’s films of 1960 Mochizuki, also writing in
the journal Film Art at this time, suggests that they brought to the screen
contemporary problems that arose out of a combination of poverty and the
Americanization of Japanese society and ‘morals’ (moraru). He continues,
stating that out of these processes many Japanese people experienced a
sense of alienation (sogai ishiki) similar to that experienced in Europe

in the nineteenth century with the rise of industrial capitalism. This was
particularly true of the Anpo generation, many of whom were criminalized
for their participation in the struggles and, like Ōshima himself, found it
difficult to gain employment in their chosen field. To support this line of
argument Aochi quotes from an interview with Ōshima published in the
women’s magazine Fujin Kōron.
I entered the Law Department of Kyoto University in April 1950. That

was the year of the outbreak of the Korean War and the year of the Red
Purge. It was the year when the violent student movement opposing the
Red Purge rose high along with the first vanguard for the protection of
democracy. While harbouring some discontent about tactics, I naturally
drew close to the student movement. (Ōshima quoted in Aochi 1961: 26)
Aochi suggests that for these reasons, Ōshima, like many of his genera-
tion, altered their career patterns in response to the politics of the times
and that it was this generation and class of intellectuals who could most
clearly identify with and understand the debate central to Night and Fog
in Japan.
Desser makes the point that it might be difficult for Western audiences
of Night and Fog in Japan to equate the horror of the Nazi death camps, as
depicted in Resnais’s film, with the politics of post-war Japan. However,
from within the ethical debate of the autonomy of the individual (shutai-
seiron) central to the philosophical basis of participatory democracy,
government policies implemented at this time as a response to US demands
encouraged a deep fear that Japan was sinking back into a pre-war mili-
tary-led government system. As Oguma argues, the 1960 Anpo struggle
was far more significant than just an opposition to the United States. It was
linked to what many now saw as a revisionism aimed at returning Japan
to its pre-war and wartime conservatism. This feeling was palpable as
the then Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke,15 a former administrator in the
colonial government in Manchuria and a reinstated A-class war criminal,
was ultimately forced from office due to public protest over the Treaty
revision and replaced by Ikeda Hayato in 1960 (Oguma 2005: 503).
Public criticism centred on Japan’s role in the American imperium as
a seeming colony, not unlike that of the Philippines, while public debate
centred on the related questions of Japan’s future position in the interna-
tional community as an unarmed neutral nation, and the protection of the
post-war Peace Constitution (Oguma 2005). For, people questioned,

how desirable is a government that has to rely on coercion to govern?
The Red Purges first implemented in the late 1940s impacted on the
film industry splitting the Tōhō Studios in half; the subsequent purge in
1950 resulted in 20,000 employees with suspected left-wing connec-
tions losing their jobs. The implementation of the Subversive Activities
Prevention Law in July 1952, preceded by the forcing of the US–Japan
Joint Security Treaty through the Diet in 1951, despite massive public
opposition, reinforced the view that opposition to US-led policy would
not be tolerated. Japan’s logistical support for US troop involvement in the
Korean War, which the then conservative Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru
is reported as saying at a meeting of the Party was ‘heaven sent’ as
special procurements for the American military would revive the flag-
ging Japanese economy after the recession caused by the implementa-
tion of the Dodge austerity plan in 1949 (Oguma 2005), combined with
there-establishment of a Japanese military capability with the euphe-
mistically called Security Forces in 1950 (and their expansion in
1952, and 1954), created a very real sense that Japanese society was
once again being subsumed within a military–industrial complex with
imperial ambitions. Only this time it was being externally, rather than
internally, orchestrated.16 The Japanese historian Ienaga Saburō expresses
this feeling most succinctly:
[T]he slogan ‘democracy’, which, properly speaking, merited one’s

wholehearted support: I saw it as nothing but hollow cant, and I was
unable to suppress the feeling that it was simply the flip side of wartime
militarism. (Ienaga 2001: 127, translated by Richard H. Minear)
To return to Desser’s point, from this context of post-war Japanese politics

driven by US military policy and the often violent political struggle to
assert national autonomy through the democratic right of protest and free
elections, it is not so difficult to equate the betrayal of humanity in Resnais’s
film and the betrayal of the promises of democracy and the failure of the
Left to implement reforms in Ōshima’s film.
In the case of the Hiroshima depicted in Hiroshima mon amour 1959

(released in Japan as A Twenty-Four Hour Romance/Nijūyō jikan no jōji),
Resnais asks the question, to what extent can anyone, who was not there to
see the flash of the blast, understand the trauma of the devastation caused
by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945? And, as the Japanese

character played by Okada Eiji (1920–1995) repeatedly tells the French
actress (Emanuelle Riva), ‘you’ve seen nothing in Hiroshima, nothing.’
This despite her insistence that she has seen everything. By which she
means the museum and the various memorials. In contrast to the ‘collec-
tive trauma’ of Hiroshima as presented in films and at the museum, the
French female character brings her personal trauma, the death of her
German soldier lover by sniper fire during the Liberation of Nevers, to
the surface of consciousness through traces of memory.17 The act of
recounting, she knows, will lead ultimately to forgetting, and she expe-
riences a feeling that she has betrayed her dead lover towards the end of
the film. Looking at her reflection in the mirror she says:
You were not quite dead. I told our story.

I betrayed you tonight with that stranger.
I told our story. It could be told you see.
Not for fourteen years have I experienced an impossible love.
Not since Nevers.
See how I forget you, see how I have forgotten you.
Look at me.
The ‘healing’ process of remembering, through the recounting of past

events in Nevers to the Okada Eiji character, and its concomitant forgetting,
represent a betrayal of the dead. In the case of Hiroshima mon amour,
for the woman, it is the betrayal of her dead German lover, hence her
reticence to confide in the Okada Eiji character. The man, as an architect,
is unknowingly complicit in the processes of collective forgetting and
the reimagining of historiography through the reconstruction of the
new post-war Hiroshima as an atomic bomb tourist centre replete with
hotels (the New Hiroshima Hotel), museums and memorial buildings
(the Dome).
Yoshida after the release of his latest film The Women in the Mirror
2002 and in conversation with the director of H story 2002, Suwa Nobuhiro,
takes up this question, raised implicitly by Alain Resnais in both Night and
Fog and Hiroshima mon amour, and that is whether it is possible and
indeed ethical to re-create through cinematic reproduction holocaustal
events of the twentieth century. Suwa, whose film H story is both a tribute
to Alain Resnais and a remake of Hiroshima mon amour, argues that
having been born in Hiroshima in 1960 the fact of the bomb had been so
woven into the fabric of his daily life growing up in that city that it had
become commonplace. However, Yoshida drawing a generational distinction
between himself and Suwa argues that the fact of the bomb in his thinking
is anything but commonplace. In relation to the theme of the Hiroshima
bomb in The Women in the Mirror he states:
In my case, because I can only grasp the atomic bomb as a most uncommon
(hinichijō) incident, I have to begin by questioning whether it is possible
to represent it [on film]. I have to start from the position that it is impos-
sible to film, and that this is a refusal to film it. Assuming it is possible to
film the atomic bomb, I think it would have to be filmed by the victims
and the dead who witnessed the instant of the flash. We who survived do
not have the right (kenri). (Suwa and Yoshida 2003: 80)
Yoshida continues referring back to a fire-bombing raid carried out over

his home town Fukui in the last days of the war. Yoshida, then a child, lost
his home during this raid.
My experience of the air raid over Fukui, the fear of that night and the
fear of the atomic bomb which I learnt of directly after became overlaid,
and formed a chain of fear, this instilled in me a dread. This is the
Hiroshima which is inside me, the meta-Hiroshima. This is the reason
why it took me more than fifty years to make The Women in the Mirror.
(Suwa and Yoshida 2003: 80)
Adieu, Summer Light (Saraba natsu no hikari/Adieu, lumière d’été)

1968, Yoshida asserts, is also about forgetting, as he explains in the same
conversation with Suwa Nobuhiro:
Even though Adieu, Summer Light is a film like a road movie in that we
travel around seven European countries, its theme is about completely
forgetting (wasuresaru) and the abandonment of any thoughts (sutesara-
reta) of the atomic bomb. An architect, who thinks that somewhere in
Europe there exists the model for a church which was destroyed by the
atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, meets a woman, who has
abandoned Japan (doroppuauto) and lives in Europe, they travel together.
When it is time for them to part, the woman draws a plan of the church
in lipstick on a table with a white cloth in the courtyard of the hotel. She
had known the location of the church all along, but was concealing the
fact that she was a victim of the Nagasaki bomb. The theme of this film
is the attempt to completely forget Nagasaki. (Suwa and Yoshida 2003:
80–81)
While Resnais clearly divides time into units by alternating between

the colour images of the present decaying ruins and iconic, black and white
photographs of the death camps in Night and Fog, and flashbacks to
Nevers in Hiroshima mon amour, Adieu, Summer Light alternates between
different registers of dialogue to signify a trajectory in which the present
does not exist, but is always a past-present or a future-present. Financed by
Japan Airlines as a means of promoting Europe as a tourist destination for
Japanese people, physical space is divided between the countries visited
by the couple and scenic locations which provide exotic backdrops for the
dialogue. Space is therefore clearly defined through the movement of the
characters, while the characters’ thoughts redefine time, at an intuitive
level, between the past-present and the future-present. Resnais employs a
similar method in his enigmatic 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad (L’annèe
dernière à Marienbad) as the locations shift between the palatial interiors
and the grounds of the hotel at Marienbad. However, Yoshida’s use of
different registers on the spoken soundtrack to convey a sense of the
significance of the past for the present and the present for the future is
more complex. In Marienbad there is an emphasis on the past-present
which is invoked through the dialogue – the monologues and on-screen
conversations. The monologues of the principal male character when
contrasted with his on-screen conversations with the woman increasingly
destabilizes his memories and thus questions are raised as to the veracity
of his recollections. Yoshida, while utilizing this technique to expose the
essentially personal nature of memories, employs three levels of spoken
sound on the soundtrack: monologues, off-screen voice-over dialogue,
and on-screen conversations, all clearly differentiated in the screenplay.
A monologue spoken by the man, Kawamura, opens the film establishing
the historical links between Nagasaki, a former treaty-port and Europe,
before merging into a voice-over conversation between the two characters.
This opening monologue is addressed to the woman (Okada Mariko 1933–);
this is not obvious in the first instance, as he only uses the informal pro-
noun omae. In this way the search for the cathedral becomes conflated
with an investigation into the woman’s past. As in Hiroshima mon amour,
the trauma of the atomic bomb becomes, through the association with
the place Nagasaki, an emotional trigger. As the woman tells Kawamura
on a Portuguese beach facing the Atlantic Ocean: ‘My mother died in

Nagasaki, in the last year of the war . . . But I don’t remember anything,
what kind of town was it?’
With all the voice-over conversations, we, as spectators, do not know
if they took place, or whether they were imagined. In this way, time is
depicted not as divisible ‘scientific time’, but as a Bergsonian intuitive
temporal flow through which we begin to sense the relevance of Naoko’s
past for her present life in Europe, and the relevance of her present
relationship with the Japanese architect, Kawamura, for her future. In the
following voice-over dialogue, Naoko is trying to reconcile her feelings
for her American husband in Paris with her feelings for the Japanese
architect:
Naoko’s voice-over: Don’t come close, I don’t love you.

Kawamura’s voice-over: What are you thinking about? Who are you
thinking about? What makes you keep silent?
Naoko’s monologue: It was for you that I left on this trip. It was to help your
work and I was happy to do it. However, this trip is somehow different
than the other trips. Is there something you were thinking of? When I said
I would go on the trip, as usual you had that sad look on your face. You
smiled and shrugged your shoulders saying ‘come back soon and good
luck’. In these eight years little has changed.
Kawamura’s voice-over: What is it that from time to time takes you off into
these silences?
The instability of memory, as an individual’s recollections, becomes

obvious as the characters contradict themselves, how many years has
Naoko spent in Europe remains unclear, is it four, eight or twenty? Images
also work to destabilize the authority of the characters as in at least one
sequence in a bull ring in Madrid it is unclear whether Kawamura is
imagining the scene or not. The scene cuts from the final stages of a bull
fight as the bull collapses to the ground to the same bull ring completely
empty except for the two protagonists. Kawamura is in the stands and
Naoko is filmed in long shot standing in the middle of the ring, with a
sword she fakes her death. Later in Sweden, Naoko wanders the streets in
her slip as Kawamura follows, this then cuts to a hotel room and Kawamura
suddenly wakes saying ‘I must have dropped off to sleep’. Naoko is
wearing the same slip.
The investigation into the location of the church increasingly gives
way, in Kawamura’s thoughts, to an investigation of the female character
Naoko herself as he begins to fall in love with her. Taken at the level of
a travelogue, the mystery of Naoko’s past is further conflated with the
mysteries of Europe waiting for the Japanese tourist to explore. Kawamura’s
presence, a Japanese architect in Europe, and Naoko’s growing fondness
for him trigger memories of her past just as the ‘impossible love’ the
female character in Hiroshima mon amour experiences for Okada Eiji
brings memories of her dead German lover and Nevers to the surface of
consciousness. As one critic reviewing Adieu, Summer Light in the journal
Art Theatre explains:
She is a woman who immediately after the war realized the dream and
escaped from Japan [Nihon dasshutsu, this is a pun on the title of a film
Yoshida made in 1964]. At the time of defeat, she experienced a loss of
faith in the ‘soil’ of Japan (Nihon no tsuchi). This faith had to a greater
or lesser extent been instilled into all Japanese since childhood. For this
woman Naoko, this experience had suddenly been condensed and no
sooner had she developed this belief, in a stroke she abandoned it. Inside
her the ‘post-war’ (sengo) remained frozen during the approximately
twenty years she has passed in Europe. (Art Theatre 1970: 43)
It is clear from the published writings of Yoshida and Ōshima that they
saw cinema as a form of political communication and not a product to
be consumed as a momentary distraction from the pressures of daily life.
This chapter, following Bourdieu’s understanding of the role of the artist
in ‘the field of cultural production’, has attempted to demonstrate, how
drawing on the example of Jean-Paul Sartre, the early films of the Italian
neo-realist movement (Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini), and the
French Nouvelle Vague director Alain Resnais, Japanese filmmakers of the
1960s avant-garde augmented their understanding of the cinematic arts as
a means of political action or praxis.
Both Yoshida and Ōshima were, in the first instance, politicized by the
loss of their ‘youth’ (seishun) spent during the last days of the war and
during the austerities of the post-defeat US-led occupation; and secondly,
through their experiences of the student movement. Both have commented
upon the impact of seeing Kurosawa Akira’s 1946 film No Regrets for Our
Youth. In the opening sequences of this film, Hara Setsuko (1920–), as the
strong-willed daughter of a Kyoto University professor, is depicted in the
mountains surrounding Kyoto running in a series of match-on-action shots
pursued by several of her father’s pupils. In the background the sound of
machine gun fire bursts into their world signalling the end of youth. In this
sense, Yoshida and Ōshima are indicative of a generational divide that split
Japanese society between a parent generation, held accountable for the
war and the failures of ‘democracy’, and the post-war generation, whose
allegiances were to the student movement. The parent generation were
again perceived to sell out to American foreign policy by accepting Prime
Minister Ikeda Hayato’s ‘income doubling’ plan in 1960. In the Nikkatsu
youth films of the ‘sun tribe’, this same concern was depicted in a James
Dean-like nihilistic rejection of the parents’ generation.
In stylist terms, as with all avant-garde filmmakers and movements,
many of their innovations stemmed from a reaction against the commercial
cinema. In the example of Yoshida and Ōshima, this was a reaction against
the conservative studio Shōchiku. Around the time of their entry into the
studio apprentice system, Kido Shirō returned as head of production in
1955 after a period of exclusion due to questions of the propriety of his
role in running the studio during the war period. The uncompromising
first two films of the ‘sun tribe’ youth subculture, starring Ishihara Yūjirō,
signalled the impetus for change. As Ōshima comments, regarding the
second Nikkatsu ‘sun tribe’ film Crazed Fruit: ‘In the rip of a woman’s
skirt and the buzz of a motorboat, sensitive people heard the heralding of
a new generation of a new Japanese film’ (Ōshima 1992: 26, translated by
Dawn Lawson).
The emphasis on the present, in the Nikkatsu youth films and early
Italian neo-realist films, challenged a culture steeped in the need to explain
the past through causality as a palliative to the wounds of defeat and
criminalization. In existentialist terms, the emphasis on the diegetic pres-
ent ensured an acceptance of responsibility for one’s actions as opposed to
the flashback structure which permits the displacement of responsibility
onto determinist environmental factors (Kinoshita Keisuke’s A Japanese
Tragedy 1953 Shōchiku). While both Yoshida and Ōshima clearly turned
to Europe as an alternative model for coming to terms with the past in
preference to the one proffered and ultimately betrayed (through the
reverse course policy) by the United States is not to argue for imitation.
Much has already been written on the impact the films of Kurosawa
Akira and Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956) had on US and European film-
making practices. However, questions surrounding the representation of
holocaustal events of the twentieth century raised implicitly in Alain
Resnais’s two films Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour had reso-
nances for Japanese filmmakers. Yoshida, takes up this theme in relation
to the objectification of Hiroshima in a 1966 essay on the relationship of

the subject (shutai) to the material object (mono). In this essay he is
concerned that post-war Japanese society is being dominated by material
objects. With the collapse of the pre-war and wartime ideologies of the
‘family state’ (kazoku kokka), society was becoming increasingly con-
sumption orientated which, Yoshida asserts, is the cause of individual
alienation. Within this context he also refers to the commercial cinema, in
particular, to the 1959 version of the war-retro film I Want to be Reborn
a Shellfish loosely based on the experiences of a minor war criminal. With
the main protagonist’s execution, the film conforms to the ‘victimization
theme’, when in point of fact the author of the prison note books
upon which the film is based was released with a pardon after serving
a period in jail.
As an alternative, Yoshida offers an existentialist reading of Hiroshima
mon amour which he argues challenges head-on the objectification of
experience through memories in popular culture. As he states:
Even the tragic fact of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima is pushed away
into forgetfulness (bōkyaku) as the flow of time eventually forcibly
confines it into a state as an object (mono). The female protagonist,
who through love and the experiences of the body (nikutai) revives the
tragedy of Hiroshima, before long comes to know barrenness (fumō).
Therefore, she calls out:
Woman: See how I forget you; see how I have forgotten you.
Look at me . . .
Hi-ro-shi-ma . . . . Hiroshima. That is your name.
Man: That is my name, yes . . . Your name is Nevers, the French
Nevers . . .
The man and the woman are in a complete state as objects (mono). The
two people in a barren state of nothingness can only call each other by
place names. (Yoshida [1960] 2006: 46)
In 2003, Yoshida’s published conversation with Suwa Nobuhiro

further exemplifies the dangers inherent in the representation in cinema
of holocaustal events raised by Resnais. Suwa, a native of Hiroshima,
exemplifies the level of banality to which mechanisms of ‘collective
memory’, that is the processes of forgetting and reimagining, have on
our understanding of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. For Suwa’s
generation growing up amidst mediated accounts of the bomb – the ‘mem-

ory museum’, the Dome, and the novel and filmed version of Children of
the Bomb (Genbaku no ko) 1952, and Black Rain/Kuroi ame (Imamura
Shōhei 1989) – it has become a fact of daily life (nichijō sahanji), while
for Yoshida’s generation it remains intimately connected to individual
recollections and associations. By Yoshida’s own admission, the atomic
bombs are linked to his childhood experiences of the fire-bombing of
Fukui and the loss of his home. While the latter half of this chapter
focused on how Yoshida and Ōshima drew upon, and developed, Resnais’s
depictions of ‘the past through memory as a filter of experience’, the next
chapter examines further how memory becomes institutionalized and
how filmmakers such as Yoshida, Ōshima and Okamoto Kihachi (1924–
2005) challenge ‘collective memory’ through visual style.
The Art Theatre Guild:
C HAPTER
HAP TE R
2
Theatres of Death and the
Challenge of History
Modernism resolves the problems posed by traditional realism, namely,

how to represent reality realistically, by simply abandoning the ground
on which realism is construed as an opposition between fact and fiction.
The denial of the reality of the event undermines the very notion of ‘fact’
informing traditional realism. (White 1996: 18)
I recognized that, unfortunately, the war dead died, frankly, in vain –

very coldhearted [sic] phrase though that is, and I thought that we should
consider how to give meaning to these meaningless deaths. How? By
working to keep such a tragedy from happening again; then and only
then will the deaths of all the victims be not meaningless deaths but
revered sacrifices . . . [M]erely to beautify deaths in and for themselves is
very dangerous. (Ienaga 2001: 128, translated by Richard H. Minear)
What currently insists on truth is disproved, because Lie or her

younger sister, Deception, often hands over only the most acceptable part
of memory, the part that sounds plausible on paper, and vaunts details to
be as precise as a photograph. (Grass 2007: 3)
I
n Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes up the
issue of representing the unrepresentable. While Alain Resnais
examined this question implicitly in relation to cinema and
representations of the Nazi death camps in Night and Fog (Nuit et brouil-
lard) 1955 and the atomic bomb in Hiroshima mon amour 1959, Sontag
considers this question in relation to the photograph. However, in both
cases the underlying concern is with how certain images of the historical
past come to be selected and appropriated by social groups as symbolic of
their collective identity, while other events go unrecorded and consigned
to oblivion. In other words, both filmmaker and intellectual are concerned
with the fissures between individual recollections and the structuring of
— 49 —
single histories encompassed within broader notions of ‘collective

memory’. As Sontag explains in relation to the photographic image:
Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what

a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think
about. It calls these ideas ‘memories’, and that is, over the long run, a
fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory –
part of the same spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collec-
tive instruction.
Sontag continues:
What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating:

that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with
the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substan-
tiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate
common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.
(Sontag 2003: 76–77, emphasis in the original)
Equally, as Günter Grass reminds us in the quotation above, individual

recollections are like their institutional counterparts in ‘collective memory’,
also subject to embellishment and selection; a topic taken up in greater
detail in Chapter 4 with regard to documentary films and ‘performance’.
Kurosawa Akira (1910–1998), in his seminal film Rashomon 1950, identi-
fied this crisis of ‘truth’ by exposing the unreliability of memory as a
testament to past events. As has been suggested in the previous chapter, the
exposure of inherent contradictions in the collective remembering of the
past, as presented in mainstream cinema, became one of the dominant
themes evident in the works of Japanese avant-garde filmmakers, such as
Yoshida (Kijū) Yoshishige (1933–) and Ōshima Nagisa (1932–). Ambiguity,
repetition, fragmentation and aporia thus become the vehicles through
which the certitudes of genre films are challenged and uncertainties of the
sources of knowledge made visible. While the previous chapter attempted
an analysis of the political dispositions of Japan’s first post-war generation
of filmmakers in relation to Europe and, in particular, the philosophies
of Sartrean ‘existentialism’, the Italian neo-realist movement (Roberto
Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica) and the French Nouvelle Vague director
Alain Resnais, this chapter will consider the films of Japanese avant-garde
The Art Theatre Guild 51
filmmakers in relation to mainstream Japanese cinema and the ‘victimiza-

tion consciousness’ (higaisha ishiki) of the war-retro genre.
As I have argued elsewhere,1 the ‘victimization’ theme, narrativized

through the ‘tragic hero’ of the war-retro genre of commercial cinema,
provided a textually mediated paradigm through which individuals could
reconcile and interpolate their personal experiences of war and defeat
coming to something like a ‘collective’ understanding of the trauma of
the past. This, I have suggested, may account in part for the enormous
popularity of films based on this theme and the number of remakes of
selected biographical texts that characterize the genre (Listen to the Roar
of the Ocean/Kike, wadatsumi no koe [1950 and 1995], Memorial to the
Lilies/Himeyuri no tō [1953, 1982 and 1995] and The Harp of Burma/
Biruma no tategoto [1956 and 1985]).
The success of this genre as an explanatory paradigm rests on a
dissolution of the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in the creation of
meaning. As Hayden White, following Fredric Jameson in another con-
text, argues, the seamless commingling of the ‘reality’ of historical events
with the imaginary of fiction in docu-dramas and historical meta-fiction
infers that ‘Everything is presented as if it were of the same ontological
order, both real and imaginary – realistically imaginary and imaginarily
real, with the result that the referential function of the images of events is
etiolated’ (White 1996: 19). This, White argues, is one of the consequences
of the ‘holocaustal events’ that have come to define the history of the
twentieth century; ‘the two World Wars, the Great Depression, a growth in
world population hitherto unimaginable, poverty and hunger on a scale
never before experienced, pollution of the ecosphere by nuclear explosion
and indiscriminate disposal of contaminates, programs of genocide under-
taken by societies utilizing scientific technology and rationalized procedures
of governance and warfare’ (1996: 20). These historical events are of
such enormity that they challenged nineteenth-century conceptions of the
historian’s role as recorder of ‘fact’ through the apportionment of human
agency. Power in the twentieth century, as Foucault has demonstrated, is
not identifiably contained within one locus, but is multifarious. Therefore,
the history of ‘events’ is written not in terms of ‘facts’, but in terms of
‘meanings’ and it is this search for stability in meaning which necessitates
the formations of ‘collective memory’ as a social basis to ameliorate the
effects of trauma on the collective imagination.
Orr in his study The Victim as Hero has discovered evidence to the
effect that the development of the ‘victimization’ theme formed part of
and was encouraged by Allied policy. A special intelligence report by the
US Morale Analysis Division recommended in June 1945 that propaganda
should give the average Japanese person hope in defeat.
While making it perfectly clear to the Japanese that we are going to

eliminate the militarists because they went to war with us, we may point
out how the militarists have harmed Japanese and we may make it clear
that we have no intention of punishing the Japanese people once the
militarists are overthrown. In this manner, the militarists may effectively
be used as a scapegoat, with the double result of weakening their hold
and leading other people to feel there is something to hope for in
surrender. (Quoted in Orr 2001: 17, emphasis added by Orr)
Orr assesses this policy in the following terms:
Apart from its obvious effectiveness in creating visceral antiwar sentiment,

war victim consciousness was promoted by Allied psychological warfare
agents and Occupation authorities to encourage alienation from the war-
time state and its military – and, after the conservative return to power,
by left-wing activists to condemn in a coded way the postwar state and
its Cold War US security alliance. (Orr 2001: 7)
Thus according to Orr’s assessment both the Left and the Right of politics
had a vested interest in appropriating ‘victimization’ as an explanatory
paradigm. Coded within the ‘tragic hero’ narrative which had, as Ivan
Morris in The Nobility of Failure (1980) explains, dominated traditional
Japanese storytelling genres, the war-retro genre of the commercial cinema,
from the late 1950s on, repositioned the trauma of war, defeat and occupa-
tion from within post-war paradigms of sacrifice and rebuilding the nation.
The backlash against the ‘victor’s justice’ and ‘victimization’ narratives
discussed by Gavin McCormack in his essay ‘The Japanese Movement to
“Correct” History’ in relation to the publication of Fujioka Nobukatsu’s
book History Not Taught in Textbooks (Kyōkasho ga oshienai rekishi) in
1996, forms part of the contemporary discourse to re-appropriate the
‘meaning’ of the past from within Japanese and not foreign agendas.
One of the stylistic conventions that both defines the ‘victimization’
theme of the commercial cinema and ensures the seamless transitions
between historical event and subjective interpolation, is the flashback,
through which the retelling of individual experience, biography, comes

to represent the experiences of the wider group. As I have argued in the
previous chapter, the past filtered through an individual’s memory as
trauma is comprised of unassimilated scraps of images, disjointed tempo-
ralities of overwhelming experiences which the ‘logic’ of the commercial
cinema’s war-retro genre rearranges into ordered evidence of empirical
historical facts through the imposition of teleological sequences of time
and an all-knowing omniscient narration style.
Typical examples of the war-retro genre produced under the auspices
of the commercial cinema begin in medias res recounting memories of
someone who in the present, that is the time of production, is already dead.
In the example of Imai Tadashi’s (1912–1992) film Until the Day We Meet
Again (Mata au hi made) 1950 the note book of the main protagonist
Saburō (Okada Eiji 1920–1995) is the narrative device through which
the already dead Saburō’s relationship with Keiko is ostensibly retold
in flashback. Equally, in The Sacrifice of the Human Torpedoes (Ningen
gyorai kaiten) 1955 again it is the inscription carved on the periscope
by the already dead Okada Eiji character, which triggers the flashback
into his life and death. However, in both cases the omniscient narration
and linear time pattern of the flashback ensures a seamless interconnection
of events as both determinate and logical, leading to the fates of the
characters. This seamless recounting masks inconsistency as, through
the omniscience of the narration, we are shown circumstances of which
the protagonists could not possibly have been aware. In this way, and
to paraphrase Yoshida’s early essay on ‘What is Meant by Cinematic
Methodology’, a logic ‘that pursues reality through reason’ is imposed on
flawed human recollection.
In some examples, such as Imai Tadashi’s first 1953 version of the
Memorial to the Lilies (Himeyuri no tō), the simple linear teleological
pattern masks the implausibility of the plot, in which all the characters die
at the end of the film. Based on the best-seller of the same title written by
Nakasone Seizan, one of the teachers who with a small group of his female
charges survived the war, there is clearly a contradiction imbedded in the
construction of time as linear. If everyone is killed in August 1945, who
has survived into the present to recount the events? Written shortly after
the war, the book (and the various film versions) documents the trials, and
in many instances deaths, of a group of young female students seconded to
work as nurses in Japanese field army hospitals in Okinawa during the US
assault on the islands. Ironically this film, a box-office hit upon its release
in 1953 is attributed as the first film to spark a ‘boom’ in war-retro films,

and was itself political as Imai is reported to have made it as a pacifist film
in a bid to counter US demands for Japan to rearm (Satō 1996 vol. iii).
Imai subsequently made another colour version in 1982. However, in
this version, and a later 1995 version (made to commemorate the fiftieth
anniversary of the end of the war), the narrative contradiction has been
removed as both films end with a depiction of Nakasone and his group of
students surrendering to the US forces, surviving to write the book and to
add authenticity to subsequent film versions. In fact, the publicity for the
1995 version stressed the fact that one of the survivors acted as an advisor
on the film.
The very fact of almost identical remakes serves to authenticate
certain accounts as ‘historiography’ institutionalizing the controlling
consciousness of biographical memory as ‘collective memory’. Although
the 1995 version of Memorial to the Lilies was made by a different director
(Kōyama Seijirō 1941–), it is very similar to Imai’s two versions and
despite the comments made by a survivor during an NHK television
interview to the effect that the remake had a didactic function to warn
future generations of the horrors of the war, there is little evidence to
suggest any real interest from this target group. Therefore, it can be argued
that these films, and by extension the war-retro genre of the second half of
the 1950s and 1960s, have stayed fixed within the generational memories
of people who experienced the war as a ‘collective memory’. Jameson’s
observation, made within the context of popular music, that repetition is
linked to generational consciousness, I would suggest, also applies to film
genres and cycles of remakes.
The passionate attachment one can form to this or that pop single,
the rich personal investment of all kinds of private associations and
existential symbolism which is the feature of such attachment, are fully
as much a function of our own familiarity as of the work itself: the pop
single, by means of repetition, insensibly becomes part of the existential
fabric of our own lives, so that what we listen to is ourselves, our own
previous auditions. (Jameson 1992: 20, emphasis mine)
In the commercial cinema the ‘victimization’ theme contains the

historical events of war within the immediate memories of the generation
who shared the experience. History, in the sense of ‘historiography’, is
expunged from the narrative as personal experiences of suffering are
determinate of the contemporary situation, that is, at the time of produc-

tion. The impact of past atrocities etiolate into the suffering of the
Japanese people. In this way, the consequences of Japanese imperial
ambitions in Asia and the war in the Pacific are firmly rooted in the
suffering of the domestic population, while the suffering of former
imperial subjects is expunged from the ‘collective memory’. To return
to Sontag: ‘What is called collective memory is not a remembering but
a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it
happened, with the pictures [and films] that lock the story in our minds’
(2003: 77).
While many of the war-retro films of the commercial cinema shore up
individuals’ accounts of past events through the repetition of plausible or
‘naturalized’ reconstructions of teleological time and omniscient narration,
this chapter will argue that Japanese avant-garde filmmakers actively
sought, through visual style, characterization and narrative, to destabilize
the ‘collective memory’ of genre films as fundamentally unreliable and
flawed, and thereby to challenge the certitudes drawn between biography
as empirical ‘historiography’ of the commercial, ‘inexplicit’ cinema. In the
independent films made with the support of the ATG by Yoshida Yoshishige,
Ōshima Nagisa and Okamoto Kihachi (1924–2005), through visual style,
characterization and narrative, the historical ‘event’ undergoes what
Jameson has defined in relation to modernist literature as a process of
‘de-realization’. In this chapter, I shall argue that like ‘modernist litera-
ture’ this ‘de-realization’ of the historical ‘event’ is achieved in Japanese
avant-garde cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s by ‘consistently voiding
the event of its traditional narrativistic function of indexing the irruption of
fate, destiny, grace, fortune, providence, and even of “history” itself into a
life . . . and give the life thus affected at worst a semblance of pattern and
at best an actual, transsocial, and transhistorical significance’ (White 1996:
24–25). In filmic terms, this is achieved through a visual style that under-
scores both how distinct the film’s mise-en-scène is from that of ‘reality’,
while exposing the filmmaker as manipulator of the observable world of
objects and landscapes which serve the filmmaker’s ends.
The shift in cinema, identified by Deleuze, away from the controlling
point-of-view of the subject, to the modernist narrative is already evident
in the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In
cinematic terms, Yoshida in Eros + Massacre (Erosu + gyakusatsu) 1969,
Purgatory Heroica (Rengoku eroika/Purgatoire eroica) 1970 and Coup
d’ État (Kaigenrei) 1973; Ōshima in Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no
yoru to kiri) 1960, Death by Hanging (Kōshikei) 1968 and Ceremonies

(Gishiki) 1971; and Okamoto Kihachi in Human Bullet (Nikudan) 1968;
like Resnais in Hiroshima mon amour, undermine historical discourses in
which a character’s end is contained within a determining beginning,
through a visual and narrative style that exposes the sources of enunciation
as human memory/trauma and thereby offering potentially flawed and
contradictory meanings. Thus, as Jameson (1984) and White (1996) note
in the fictional writings of Sartre, the ‘historical event’ is presented as a
representation of a thought about the event, rather than a presentation of
the event itself.2
Following Deleuze, we can argue that these films are not organized accord-
ing to spatial patterns of time, but through events or moments out of which
other moments or events grow and impact on one another in an often dis-
jointed accumulation in the consciousness of the characters. Therefore, it
is not the time of teleological progression, but of conjoined moments of
association represented in tableaux-like images. As one Japanese critic, in
an article titled ‘Existentialism and the Image’ (Jitsuzonshugi to eizō)
published in Film Art in 1966, commenting on Yoshida’s first independent
film A Story Written in Water (Mizu de kakareta monogatari/Histoire écrite
par l’eau 1965) explains, the film is structured around three registers
of ‘reality’: a ‘present reality’ (ima no genjitsu), a ‘past reality’ (kako no
genjitsu) and an ‘illusory reality’ (gensō no genjitsu). He continues:
I do not think the film is about linear time. Undoubtedly, it is the reverse.
This production eliminates the order of time, it pursues a reality (riaritei)
from which linear time has been extracted. . . . If we question human
reality; until recently, we have imagined humans and the world accord-
ing to the law of causality (ingaritsu) and a crudely applied psychology.
However, if we thoroughly investigate the law of causality, it is nothing
more than the ordering of time. If we thoroughly investigate time
(jikangaku), in actuality the law of causality no longer exists. In phi-
losophy, Henri Bergson, and in literature, Marcel Proust, neither had an
interest in explaining the workings of inner man through structures of
linear time. (Kurita 1966: 76)
Kurita explains that the ‘sexual act is the only one that exists as a moment’.
It exists as the moment when two bodies come into contact. As Jameson
explains in relation to ‘nausea’, sex, ‘is the moment of feeling acutely that
we exist; yet since we always do exist, it is subjectivity, the historical fact
of suddenly becoming aware of our existence, that lifts this uninterrupting

existence to the status of a special moment in our lives’ (Jameson 1984:
33). This physical moment through which we become acutely aware of
our existence, Kurita argues, is divorced from linear time and in A Story
Written in Water represents the act through which other events and moments
multiply and impact on one another within the consciousness of the main
character Shizuo (Irikawa Yasunori 1939–). Spaces which are defined by
bounded objects, and time, which is made visual through the movement of
events perceived in consciousness, affect each other.
A Story Written in Water, juxtaposes the world of lived consciousness,
in the ‘tram-having-to-be-caught’ sense of the reality of living in the
present with the reflected consciousness of Shizuo who, through moments
of contemplation, presents to the spectator past events as representations
of thoughts about events and ‘not the event itself’. The accumulation of
sexual moments from the three registers of reality – the ‘present [living]
reality’, a ‘past reality’ and an ‘illusory reality’ – are linked in Shizuo’s
consciousness to his anxieties about the riddle of female sexuality brought
to the foreground of his consciousness through his impending marriage.
And in narrative terms, the opening sequence of the film when he finds an
anonymous letter in his desk draw questioning whether his fiancée is
a virgin. The insecurities about his impotence brought to the fore of his
consciousness by his impending marriage, become, in the reflected past,
conflated with questions of incest as his future father-in-law, Denzō, is
also his widowed mother’s (Okada Mariko 1933–) long-term lover. These
issues are further complicated in the register of ‘illusory reality’ by
Shizuo’s Oedipal desire for his mother and subsequent jealousy of Denzō.
While A Story Written in Water explores male anxieties about female
sexuality through the stylistic juxtaposition of different registers of the
consciousness of the main character, Yoshida, in his later historical trilogy
produced under the auspices of ATG (Eros + Massacre, Purgatory Heroica
and Coup d’État), applies the same narrative strategy and characterization
to the historical event.
The Challenge of History

In 1969 two ATG productions were screened in France. Yoshida Yoshishige’s
1969 film Eros + Massacre was screened at the Avignon Film Festival
before being moved to Paris, while Ōshima Nagisa’s Death by Hanging
1968 was screened at Cannes. Along with Ōshima’s 1971 film Ceremonies
(made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of ATG),
these productions have come to be regarded in the West as iconic films of
Japan’s post-war avant-garde. All three films, along with Yoshida’s lesser-
known ATG production Coup d’État, are linked thematically to the
reappraisal, by the Left, of the early twentieth-century history of Japan
and its legacies. Writing in the journal Art Theatre about Coup d’État one
Japanese critic muses:
Yoshida creates space without depth. By without depth I mean that

background circumstances are excluded and space divested of history.
Yoshida’s characteristic techniques of smooth flat images erase the laws
of [historical] perspective . . . Of course, this has to be depicted in the
monotones of black and white.
He continues, reiterating a common theme that with defeat and the post-
war occupation, history came to an end:
This does not mean that the past or history are not the subjects of his
films. That is not the case, his narratives verify the fact that the past is
dragged into the midst of the present and that the past and history cannot
be concluded. (Art Theatre 1973: 14)
Eros + Massacre set in the Taishō (1912–1926) and contemporary (1969)

periods, Ceremonies through the reflexive biography of the main characters
who personify the imperial landscapes of Japan’s ambitions in the early
twentieth century, and Coup d’État based on a characterization of the
ideologue Kita Ikki (1883–1937), encapsulate through narrative many of
the themes central to this reappraisal of history, while in stylistic terms
these films challenge the spacio-temporal coordinates and determinate
locations upon which both theories of ‘montage’ and ‘continuity editing’
are based, and which came to dominate the production codes of commer-
cial war-retro films based on themes of ‘victimization consciousness’.
As stated earlier, Yoshida and his contemporaries sought to disrupt the
‘cosy’ relationship between mainstream cinema’s formulaic structures and
the complicity of the audience who knowingly stay unchallenged within
their preferred genres, cycles of films, remakes and the star system. Alter-
natively, Yoshida and his compatriots, founded upon a theory of the ‘denial
of the self’ (jiko hitei) or the ‘death of the author’, utilized visual style as
a medium of disillusionment through a denial of spectator expectations.

The aim of the filmmaker thus shifts from an emphasis on the meaning
of images and sequences, to an emphasis on their effects. In this sense,
the films considered in this chapter are all characterized by an attempt
to communicate to the spectator through visual style the fact that the
narratives depicted on the screen are fabrications, and that they are only
completed through a process of construction by the spectator at the point
of viewing. The spectator is forced to construct his or her meanings from
the images and sequences by entering into a dialogue with the filmmaker
through processes of solving the questions posed by the narrative and
understanding the phenomenological world the films depict through mise-
en-scène. Therefore, due to the entropic nature of meaning aimed for by
these filmmakers any analysis of these films can only be founded upon a
contextualization of the narratives and characterization, and a discussion
of visual style.
Thematically, Eros + Massacre links the failures of post-war left-wing

political movements that had converged around opposition to the imple-
mentation of the Subversive Activities Prevention Law (Hakai Katsudō
Bōshihō also commonly known as the Habōhō) in 1952, the anti-US
demonstrations opposing the revision of various security treaties and the
Vietnam War, with the suppression of the Left in the late Meiji (1868–
1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) periods. In 1911, 12 people with left-wing
sympathies were executed for ‘conspiring’ to assassinate the Emperor
Meiji in what became known as the High Treason Incident (Taigyaku
Jiken) of 1910. In Japanese historical discourse, this period, and this
‘incident’ in particular, is seen as marking a turning point in Japanese
politics away from an open intellectual environment to what is commonly
referred to as the ‘winter years’ (fuyu no jidai) of the socialist movement.
Similarly, Coup d’État focuses on the iconic figure of Kita Ikki whose
philosophical work, The Fundamental Principles for the Reorganization
of Japan (Nihon Kaizō Hōan) published in 1923, inspired young military
officers to rebellion under the banner of the Shōwa Restoration (ishin). As
Tankha explains:
For Kita, the Meiji ishin [restoration] was a bourgeois revolution just like
the French Revolution, and represented the victory of the lower classes
who overthrew the feudal rule of the samurai . . . The legal establishment
of a classless state in 1868 was followed by a reverse course from the
Satsuma rebellion of 1877, during which Japan entered an economic

period of warring states (sengoku). That is, the capitalists were the
economic samurai (e.g. bureaucrats, intellectuals) and the people the
economic peasants. To end this distortion of the true objectives of
the Meiji ishin a second ishin was required. (Tankha 2006: 71)
This military uprising became known as the 26 February 1936 Incident

(2.26). In popular history (at least 14 films have been made on this topic to
date), this ‘incident’ marks the turning point to war as the execution of the
leaders of the coup along with Kita Ikki in 1937 purportedly left the way
clear for the military faction led by Tōjō Hideki (1884–1948) to come to
prominence.
One of the main historical protagonists in Eros + Massacre, the anar-
chist Ōsugi Sakae (1885–1923), a prominent political activist, was in
prison at the time of the High Treason Incident of 1910 for his involvement
in an earlier ‘incident’, the Red Flag Incident of 1908, as such, he escaped
the police round-up. Upon leaving prison, he composed the following
haiku, which alludes to the deaths by hanging of the defendants in the High
Treason trial and is the epithet that appears early in the film: ‘Spring, in
March the remaining hanging flowers flutter’ (Haru san kubiri nokosare
hana ni mau). However, in the chaotic aftermath of the Kantō Earthquake
of 1923, Ōsugi and his feminist lover Itō Noe (1895–1923), along with
Ōsugi’s young nephew, were arrested by the Kenpeitai (gendarmerie)
officer Amakasu Masahiko3 and summarily executed. Similarly Kita Ikki,
the ideologue behind the 26 February 1936 Incident, was summarily
executed with the military officers who had carried out the coup, this,
despite his purported lack of actual involvement in the uprising.
Yoshida, in an interview published in the journal Film Art (Eiga Gei-
jutsu), discusses the discontinuities between pre- and post-war ideologies,
which he argues are the result of the social breakdown of ‘collective
memory’ due to the ideological confusion precipitated by defeat and
occupation. In Yoshida’s terms, the war generation could no longer
hand down memories because these memories had been criminalized
and disgraced. Silence, in many instances replaced remembering. Yoshida
continues:
[T]he conditions under which we now live [in the 1960s] are ideologically
anarchistic. Somehow, the form pre-war ideology took, and the form that
evolved in the post-war, do not connect very well. When I consider this
carefully, I can’t help feeling that Ōsugi’s situation is somehow analogous.
(Yoshida 1969b: 45–46)
In this article, Yoshida is saying that the legacies of defeat – such as the
ideological anarchy experienced by the post-war generation around the
turmoil of political and intellectual divisions associated with the opposi-
tion to the implementation of the Subversive Activities Prevention Law,
the student movements and the 1968 Anpo struggle – were not dissimilar
to the state of the Left in Japan after the High Treason Incident of 1910.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Left had again been plagued by divisions,
routed through the Red Purges, and threatened with legal sanctions under
the Subversive Activities Prevention Law which was widely interpreted
by the Left as the reinstatement of the Peace Preservation Laws of 1925
and 1929.
In the 1910s, Ōsugi, unable to operate in the public sphere, turned to a
private politics of sexuality which challenged the Confucian-based family
structure (ie) upon which the Imperial System was placed as the head of
the ‘family state’ (kazoku kokka). This challenge was seen as such a threat
that it led to his extrajudicial killing by the Kenpeitai in 1923. As Yoshida
explains:
The murder (gyakusatsu) of Ōsugi Sakai and Itō Noe directly after the
Great Kantō Earthquake [1923], was clearly an act of State violence.
However, if it was to suppress Ōsugi Sakai’s political activities, it
would have been sufficient to arrest and incarcerate him. In actuality,
they did not stop at this. The necessity that drove them to destroy him
physically, was the crime of his imagination – his theory of free sex
destroyed the family, it did not recognize the system of primogeniture,
and ultimately denied the existence of the State. Thus, because his
imagination reached such an extreme, the State, in order to stop
his imagination, had no alternative, but to murder him. (Yoshida
1971: 32)
Similarly, as the playwright and the screenwriter of Coup d’État

Betsuyaku Minoru (1937–) argues, Kita Ikki, like Ōsugi Sakae was
murdered by the State because the authorities feared his influence.
It was not sufficient to incarcerate him, he had to be physically removed.
In the two cases, Kita’s and Ōsugi’s, the film historian Hirasawa refers
to their deaths in terms of ‘state terrorism’ (kokka tero). As Betsuyaku
continues:
It is reported that the court hearing the trial of the 26 February Incident
had already pre-determined to execute Kita. That is to say, that the
officers who carried out the attempted coup were inspired by Kita’s ideas
(shisō) . . . The government authorities did not attack Kita’s thoughts,
but rather attacked his personality (jinkaku) . . . Their fear was of the
spirit (seishin) of his personality which could separate off from his
thoughts, and become independent and treasonous against the Emperor.
(Quoted in Hirasawa 2004: 151)
Yoshida, in an interview elaborates, explaining Ōsugi’s murder in the

existentialist terms of his ‘being’, in other words, what his existence
represented to others: ‘Ōsugi was not killed because, as a principle, he
fought against authoritarianism, but because his very existence (sonzai)
was anti-authoritarian, and anti-social’ (Yoshida 1969b: 50). Yoshida
continues, arguing that Ōsugi’s ideas (shisō) did not die with him and that
his belief in ‘free love’ and his lack of concern for scandals have relevance
for contemporary (1960s) Japanese youth.
Theatres of Death
[Ceremonies] is a stultifying, evil theatre, not the free theatre of the
madman rolling on the floor, or the fool’s theatre of ‘democracy’, base-
ball. It is the theatre of repressive fathers, a theatre of lies which can
contain only one authentically liberating gesture; that of ritual suicide.
(Burch 1979: 342)
The traditions of ‘humanism’ evident in mainstream studio films centred

on the ‘victimization’ theme link people to objects and the landscape by
projecting meanings onto those objects and landscapes through analogy
and metaphor. The opening shots of waves crashing onto a beach infuses
the sea with meanings of entrapment and the Okada Eiji character’s
untimely death in The Sacrifice of the Human Torpedoes, while Saburō’s
notebook becomes a metaphor for his love of Keiko in Until the Day
We Meet Again. As argued above, this predestined humanism becomes
paradigmatical of the war experience and, in the films of the avant-garde

filmmakers discussed here, was to be resisted by highlighting the symbolic
nature of the protagonists through a refusal to individuate them by the act
of naming. In Ceremonies, the first names of the main male line overtly
links the generations to Japan’s imperial ambitions as the Chinese charac-
ters (kanji) for ‘Masuo’ mean ‘man from Manchuria’ and his dead father’s
name, ‘Kanichirō’, contains the character ‘kan’ meaning Korea. In both
cases the protagonists, as representatives of the Sakurada family of high
government bureaucrats, are synonymous with the imperial landscapes of
their births.
In the contemporary post-war period, the Sakurada family is divided
between the Right and the Left of politics, which the film historian Satō
Tadao (1987) argues is indicative of Japanese society at that time. As
Takubo Hideo, writing in Art Theatre (Eiga Geijutsu), explains:
‘Politics’ is at the centre of the Sakurada family, and ‘politics’ is at the

centre of society; this is the basis of Japanese nativist family authority
and it flows through the dark blood of tribalism and is passed on through
ceremonies [rituals]. When pressed by the physical presence of the
grandfather, Masuo’s and Terumichi’s pain extends beyond the person of
the grandfather to the ‘family’, to ‘relations’, to the ‘local community’
and to ‘politics’. (Takubo 1971: 18)
The characters in Ceremonies are exposed as representations of Japan’s

imperial past. Masuo’s father, Kanichirō, a militarist who does not appear
in the film but whose presence is felt throughout, committed suicide on
1 January 1946 when the Emperor renounced his divinity. In a letter he left
for Masuo to be given to him when he came of age, Kanichirō explains that
this act of renunciation by the Emperor symbolized the end of Japan. Right-
leaning Tadashi joins the Self Defence Forces and dies in unexplained
circumstances during the film after a failed coup, his father is a war
criminal who returns from China after his release from prison, Terumichi
(Nakamura Otsuo 1940–) is the illegitimate child of the head of the
household (who forced himself on Kanichirō’s fiancée), and yet another
uncle is a member of the Communist Party. These complex ties of blood
link all the protagonists to the aging head of the family (Satō Kei 1928–),
a high government official purged immediately following defeat only to be
reinstated at the time of the American ‘reverse course’ policy. Through
these blood links contemporary (1971) political power structures are
symbolically traced to their origins in the Manchurian Incident of 1931.

This incident is generally understood to mark the beginning of Japan’s
15-year war. The legacies of these imperial ambitions still reverberate
having a profound impact upon the grandchildren, Masuo, Ritsuko (Kaku
Atsuko 1938–), Tadashi and the illegitimate Terumichi living in the
contemporary Japan 25 years after defeat.
In the Human Bullet 4 the main character is also styled as a stereotype.
In this case parodying the war-retro subgenre films based on the exploits
of the Special Attack Forces (more commonly known as the kamikaze),
the protagonist is simply referred to as Aitsu (literally ‘that fellow’), an
informal pronoun. The opening sequences of the film are of a white-gloved
hand writing a mathematical calculation on a blackboard as the voice-over
narrator, using statistics on age and longevity, subtracts the average age of
death for males in 1945 from that for 1968 (the year the film was made)
and arrives at Aitsu’s (Terada Minori 1942–) age of 21.6 years old. Simi-
larly, the main protagonist in Death by Hanging5 is simply known as ‘R’.
R’s case history is also framed in the opening sequence within impersonal
statistical calculations. In this instance, the statistics, appearing on the
screen are taken from a survey carried out in Japan, by the Ministry for
Justice in June 1967, to ascertain attitudes to the death penalty.
Those against the abolition of the death penalty 71 per cent.

Those who approve of the abolition of the death penalty 16 per cent.
The don’t knows 13 per cent.
The voice-over narrator (Ōshima Nagisa) makes a direct address to the

audience:
Are you opposed to the abolition of the death penalty or do you support
the abolition of the death penalty? Ladies and gentlemen, you who make
up the seventy-one percent opposed to the abolition of the death penalty,
have you ever seen an execution chamber? Have you ever seen an
execution carried out?
The narrator then describes in detail the layout of the prison and the
location, dimensions and architectural features of the execution chamber
set within the prison confines. This documentary-style ‘voice-of-god’ nar-
ration is supported by aerial shots of a prison compound. As the narrator
continues with a description of the inner execution chamber, followed by

a description of the procedures leading up to an execution, the camera
moves into the execution chamber as we, the audience, are confronted
with its layout. Based on a high profile case involving a Korean youth who
was arrested in 1958 and executed in 1962 for the murder and molestation
of two Japanese high school girls, these opening sequences define ‘R’ as
the statistic by which the 71 per cent in favour of the death penalty know
such criminals. Equally, Aitsu in the Human Bullet, is introduced as a mere
statistic of the war dead for the post-war 1968 audience.
The first sequence in Eros + Massacre is devoted to the naming of the
two female characters and, the actor, Okada Mariko assuming her role in
the film in relation to Eiko. Filmed as a documentary, Eiko addresses
Okada as Mako (Itō Noe and Ōsugi Sakae’s daughter) and interrogates her
as to her identity and her relationship with her mother. The camera stays
fixed on Okada sitting in a chair lit by a strong spotlight, while, Eiko’s
voice comes from off screen.
Eiko: You are Mako? You are the love child of Itō Noe who with her anarchist
partner Ōsugi Sakae was murdered during the confusion of the Kantō
Earthquake in 1923? (A pause, Okada remains silent and Eiko continues.)
At the time your mother was murdered you were seven, weren’t you? Tell
me what you remember from that time.
Yomota likens this opening interrogation scene to the traditions of the Noh
theatre as he explains:
At the same time the strong sense of formality is associated with the
wearing of the mask in the Noh theatre . . . The woman emphatically
referred to as Mako is summoned . . . and seemingly, as an actor, she puts
on the mask and takes on the name. (Yomota 2004: 190)
She then protests assuming an anonymity by referring to herself in

the abstract as ‘A’ ko (ko, the female suffix for Japanese names), her
interrogator then drawing a phonetic pun on the letter ‘A’ tells the Okada
character that she herself is Eiko, ‘I am Eiko, Sokutatsu Eiko a twenty year
old student’, to which Okada Mariko responds saying: ‘Well then, I am ‘B’
ko’. In this way, as Yomota explains: ‘[I]n an instant, the two women name
each other. They establish themselves as alter-egos’ (Yomota 2004: 190).
The Okada character then refuses to accept this ascription as Itō Noe’s
daughter as she refuses to participate in the interview. Instead she takes on
the part of Itō Noe herself. As Yomota points out, this documentary-like
exchange and the ascription of names indicates to the spectator that we
are to see a film about Ōsugi Sakae and Itō Noe, but that ‘It will not be a
truthful reproduction of a biographical past.’ Yomota continues:
The starting point of Eros + Massacre is that the enigmatic (nazo) woman
portrayed by Okada Mariko appears as an archetypal woman (onna no
genkei). From the beginning, she is derived from Eiko, Itō Noe is created
from Eiko’s imagination. (Yomota 2004: 192)
By ‘rejecting [linear] narrative’ (monogataru koto o kyohi shi) Yoshida

further compounds this sense that Itō Noe’s existence is derived from the
contemporary Eiko’s imagination.
In all three films, Human Bullet, Eros + Massacre and Ceremonies,
past and present are juxtaposed. In the Human Bullet, the contrast is
between that of the director’s own war generation and the hedonism of the
1960s youth ‘sun tribe’ culture which culminates in a disturbing final
sequence depicting the hapless and now long dead protagonist Aitsu
floating in skeletal form, complete with glasses and military cap, in his
44-gallon drum off the coast of Japan as the contemporary ‘sun tribe’
generation whiz around him on water-skis to the accompaniment of a
jaunty popular tune. Not only does this film through this final sequence
raise the question, for what purpose was Aitsu and the war generation
sacrificed, but also challenges, through the black comedy format, main-
stream kamikaze film conventions first established in productions such as
the 1953 Beyond the Clouds and the 1955 The Sacrifice of the Human
Torpedoes and, continuing into the present in the latest addition to the
genre, in the 2006 The Sea with No Exit (Deguchi no nai umi). Through
this challenge to genre conventions, Human Bullet redefines ‘sacrifice’ as
an expository concept that salvaged both a meaning for the extremes
of war, and an answer to one of the most pressing questions posed in the
post-defeat era: What do we tell the war dead?
Through popular discourses, centred on the notion of ‘sacrifice’,
mainstream kamikaze genre films attempt to restore the officers of the
Special Attack Squadrons as cultural icons who, despite knowing Japan
would not prevail in the Pacific War, freely sacrificed themselves for a new
post-war Japan. This dominant reading of their actions is supported in
Japanese popular discourse by references to poems such as the following

composed by the founder of the kamikaze squadrons Vice-Admiral Ōnishi
Takijirō.
Refreshingly
After the violent storm
The moon rose radiant.
(Quoted in Iguchi et al. 1958: 187)
This poem is said to predict Japanese social and economic restoration

after the purgation of war. As one kamikaze officer is reported saying,
‘a nation had to suffer and be purified every few generations, so that it
could become stronger by having its impurities removed’ (quoted in
Morris 1980: 314).
Human Bullet, through exaggeration and distortion, parodies these
conventions and by extension these sentiments, thus subverting the domi-
nant meaning of ‘sacrifice’ as constructed in mainstream genre films. In
contrast, to the emotionalism of the mainstream genre films, through the
use of Brechtian alienation devices and comedy, Human Bullet distances
the spectator from the hero who is exposed in his physical nakedness
and vulnerability as a stereotypical representation of the iconography
associated with the image of the kamikaze – youth, sexual innocence
and sincerity (makoto). The spectator is, through the anonymity of the
character, encouraged towards a critical response to this image as a
construction. When asked his name by the bullying sergeant he replies,
Sakura, which references the spectacular but short-lived cherry blossoms,
symbol of the kamikaze and synonymous with Japan. It also forms the first
Chinese character (kanji) in the Sakurada family name in Ceremonies.
While Human Bullet juxtaposes the past and present to devastating
effect in the final sequence, Ceremonies shifts between two distinctive
registers of the present – filmed on location as Masuo and Ritsuko travel
to a remote island after receiving a telegram from Terumichi announcing
his intended suicide; and Masuo’s reflective memories, filmed within a
constructed studio set at the Kyoto Daiei Studio of the rambling family
home and grounds. The camera and locations thereby highlight the two
registers of Masuo’s consciousness through visual style – the ‘realism’ of
the journey to the island and the artificial theatricality of the family home.
Masao’s reflective voice-over narration of the past reinforces the sense
that these scenes are his, and no one else’s recollections. Indeed Ritsuko,
in at least one scene, contradicts him as she denies ever having played
baseball with him as a child. The two worlds of the film collide in the final
sequences when Masuo and Ritsuko finally reach the remote island and
entering a shack on a pebble beach the set transforms into the stage where
Terumichi’s body lies naked and innate after committing suicide. Ritsuko,
in time honoured fashion, binds her legs and hands, takes poison and lies
beside him in a ‘love suicide’. The two characters thus by making the ulti-
mate sacrifice determine to end the Sakurada line through ritual suicide.
By shattering the habits by which we see them, Ōshima in Night and
Fog in Japan and Ceremonies exposes social ritual, that is, ceremonies
(weddings and funerals), as static, anti-historic (in the sense that history is
traditionally concerned with change) institutions which exist to ensure
social continuity. While Ōshima draws on stylized flashbacks, Yoshida in
Eros + Massacre rejects their use, instead two levels of narrative time are
interwoven and at times overlap, making it difficult for the spectator to
reconstruct a coherent teleology. When the young Itō Noe travels to Tokyo
from her home in Kyushu in 1913 she does so on the Shinkansen and
arrives at modern-day Tokyo. In answer to the question, ‘how do you
depict the past?’ Yoshida in an interview explains:
I adopted a style that brings Ōsugi back into the contemporary period.
Therefore, when Itō Noe at age eighteen comes to Tokyo for the second
time having been called by [the feminist activist] Hitatsuka Raichō
[1886–1971], she arrives at the contemporary Shinbashi Station with the
Shinkansen in the background and takes a rickshaw through today’s
Ginza. Ultimately, the frames of past and present completely disappear,
in this way, there is the sense that contemporary young women and Itō
Noe are able to converse. Therefore, this is one way in which I challenge
history. (Yoshida 1969b: 46)
Other techniques employed are to give minimal direction to actors, while

the screenplay is loosely defined and critically analysed during the filming
process.
By juxtaposing different time frames, rather than linking images through
established techniques of continuity editing and flashbacks, the narrative
in both Eros + Massacre and Ceremonies is disrupted forming fragmented,
tableaux-like sequences where stillness takes precedence over action.
Often this stillness in Yoshida’s films is refracted through mirrors, water
and glass, thereby reversing the conventions of ‘classic’ cinema where the
action of the characters defines the space, and determines time within the
scene, the ‘movement image’ in Deleuze’s taxonomy. Composition, rather
than a character’s actions, is central to the entropic world depicted in
Eros + Massacre and Ceremonies. Physical movement is limited in Cere-
monies to the journey and is marked by place-names (Hanada Airport and
Kagoshima Station) and modes of transport (the Shinkansen and ferry).
Yoshida argues that this leaves the images open to interpretation by the
spectator to create his or her own meanings. ‘In this sense the images
would not be those of the auteur (sakka), I could not own them.’
Structured around two, sometimes parallel and sometimes coexistent,
generations and time-frames Eros + Massacre questions the anarchist
notion of ‘free love’ as represented through the philosophies, and State-
sponsored murders, of Ōsugi Sakae and his lover Itō Noe, and the
consumer-orientated understandings of desire as symbolized by the
‘prostitute’ of the fictitious contemporary 20-year-old Eiko. Within
the context of contemporary 1969 Japan, the film depicts the ‘prostitute’
of the 1960s as a development of a hollow sense of the commodification
of the body, a theme also evident in Ōshima’s Cruel Story of Youth and
Sun’s Burial (Taiyō no hakaba 1960). Eiko, in an attempt to understand
her own and Wada’s inability to find sexual gratification, reflects on
the Taishō anarchist’s attempts to live according to his philosophy of ‘free
love’, while he was having sexual relations with three women: his legal
wife Yasuko and the feminists Kamichika Ichiko (1888–1981) and Itō Noe.
Purportedly, through ‘free love’ Ōsugi was attempting an existentialist
freeing of the individual from the constraints of a Neo-Confucian marriage
system based on arranged marriages and property rights determined
through primogeniture. As he explains to Itō Noe:
Ōsugi: I have always thought that I would like to become an etymologist.

Itō: An etymologist?
Ōsugi: If I don’t become an ideologist (shugisha), no I mean when I stop
being an ideologist that is what I shall become.
Itō: Please don’t change the subject.
Ōsugi: But that is my answer. When you left the house what did you see?
Itō: What? The town. People moving.
Ōsugi: (Laughing) The sky is the first thing to enter my vision, the sky, the
sun, the moon and the stars, next the mountains and the fields, the woods
and the breeze. In other words, if in nature there are insects, then there are
also people. Both represent one form of living beings. The bee creates a
hive and collects honey, people create small families (katei). The bee for
the sake of honey and people for . . .
Itō: Speak plainly please.
Ōsugi: In conclusion, people have evolved from monkeys and now create
families. When we evolve a little further, the family will change and we
will come to an age when the union between a man and a woman will be
free. The shackles (sokubaku) of the system of private ownership will also
vanish like the mist.
Itō: Do you really believe in that theory?
Ōsugi: Yes, because it is a fact that living creatures are still evolving. I do not
recognize Tsuji [Jun 1884–1944] as your husband. I do not recognize the
family, because all I recognize is the free union between a man and a
woman.
Itō: (Laughing) Even if I left Tsuji’s house, I would not enter into your
household.
Ōsugi: Because you don’t believe in the family?
Itō: No, I wouldn’t want to break free from one submissive prison only to
move into another.
Ōsugi: I didn’t say we would start a family.
Itō: Therefore, are you saying I shouldn’t come?
Ōsugi: The world of insects is interesting; it is a world without social
obligations, without emotion, and without money. It is my dream that
in one hundred years . . .
By 1923 this attack on the Confucian family was correctly identified

as an attack on the basis of the ‘family state’, the kazoku kokka. As
Yoshida’s interpretation of his character reveals when questioned on the
meaning of revolution and human freedom, Ōsugi responds:
Ōsugi: You ask, what does revolution mean for us. In order to achieve
absolute freedom, there are measures. The first principal measure is the
abolition of the exploitation of people by people, therefore, what is this
system of private property that recognizes and upholds this exploitation?
It is the system that, in the name of morality, unites one man and one
woman for the hereditary transference of property. And it is our volition
that sustains the basis of this system. This is where the problem is. As for
revolution it is the destruction of this system. Married couples, the married
couple creates a family, families create the nation . . .
The layering and overlapping of time and space pushes Ōsugi and his
lovers to the regions where they dissolve into the collectivity of historicity
and emerge having been reconfigured within the imagination of the two
contemporary figures. As the male student, Wada, reads out an account
of the murder of Ōsugi, Itō and the young nephew’s last moments from
a biographical account – People I Remember: The Last Days of Ōsugi
Sakai – Eiko flashes slides of the destruction of Tokyo in the wake of the
earthquake onto a screen.6 After her companion has finished reading and
dismissed the text, Eiko walks up to the screen and, standing in front of it,
the images flash across her body. The past is never concluded, but is
‘dragged into the midst of the present’ written onto our very being.
Just 25 years after defeat and a little more than a year since the serialization
of his appeal to the youth of Japan For the Young Samurai (published
between May 1968 and April 1969), on 25 November 1970, the right-wing
writer and intellectual Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) shocked the nation
when he committed ritual suicide by disembowelment (seppuku) at the
Headquarters of the Self Defence Forces. The theatricality of this event
was made more poignant as Mishima played out his last scenes from the
balcony of the senior officer’s room to a crowd of dismayed and at first
dismissive young recruits. Dressed in military uniform and flanked by
members of his private army, Mishima brandished his sword as he made
his appeal before retreating into the office to die. Throughout the 1960s,
Mishima had rehearsed his death in three films (The Dry Wind/Karakkaze
yarō [1960], Patriotism/Yūkoku [1966] and Killer/Hitokiri [1969]) and
in a series of photographic portraits as a representation of himself as the
martyred St Sebastian. However, it was perhaps through his short film
Patriotism, based on his novella of the same title, and produced under the
auspices of the ATG that Mishima comes closest to his ideal of seppuku
(self-immolation). Set on the classical Noh stage with a musical score
taken from Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, the film ostensibly
depicts the duality of physical love and death of a military officer and his
young bride set against the historical backdrop of the 26 February 1936
Incident (2.26 Jiken) when a group of young military officers attempted a
coup d’ état. Both the film historian Satō Tadao (1987) and the film critic
Higuchi Naofumi (2002) link the death of Mishima to that of Terumichi at
the end of Ceremonies. For as Burch states, commenting on Ceremonies,
in the epithet that opens this section: ‘It is the theatre of repressive fathers,
a theatre of lies which can contain only one authentically liberating

gesture; that of ritual suicide’ (Burch 1979: 342). As Satō states:
This film captures the barren history (fumō no rekishi) of the twenty-five
years since the end of the war. It recounts what are, in effect, the origins
of this barrenness. These origins are, through the [Sakurada] family
which is dominated by both left and right-wing factions, symbolic of
Japan’s peculiar structures of power.
The unique narrative style of this whole film, which is structured
around wedding ceremonies, Buddhist masses and funerals, hints at the
hold these structures of power exert on all the characters. (Satō 1987:
346–347)
Through the consciousness of the main character Masuo, the legal heir of
the Sakurada family, the film plots the history of post-war Japan through
family ceremonies, or as Iwasaki points out a better rendering of the
Japanese title Gishiki as ‘rituals’. ‘The rituals (gishiki) exist as institutions
that constantly confirm the family system (kazoku seido), reinvigorate that
confirmation, and strengthening the bonds’ (Iwasaki 1971: 9). He continues,
pointing out that the seating arrangements at these family rituals spatially
represent the hierarchical ordering of the main house and branch families.
The grandfather, formerly a high official in the wartime government, was
purged after the war as a ‘war criminal’. However, with the Cold War and
US-led occupation force’s implementation of the ‘reverse course’ policy, he
was restored to public life. As Iwasaki explains: ‘In this way, Ceremonies
presents an analysis of the patriarchal family structure, which in Japan
since time immemorial, has formed the main pillar of what is known as
the vertically structured society’ (Iwasaki 1971: 10). Based entirely on
Masuo’s reflective consciousness, the film, through visual style, depicts
Masuo’s confinement within the family’s power structures which are
spatially symbolized through the configurations of the household and
located in time through ceremonies which are the historical markers or
record of the family’s institutional memory.
Summation
Our present may be exposed, floating on the clear surface of our hidden
memory. However, this memory is never constant and fixed. If we leave
the past as it is, it will remain vacant forever. We capture the present,
working on the past, negating or reconstructing it, and we continue to

live. (Bergson quoted in McDonald 1983: 172)
In the films produced under the auspices of ATG and considered in this
chapter, the filmmakers, Yoshida Yoshishige, Ōshima Nagisa and Okamoto
Kihachi, were concerned with the consequences of the past and its legacies
as they impacted on the 1960s post-war generation. Challenging the
seamless interpolation of the individual into the mega-narratives of the
‘collective memory’ of the mainstream studios’ generic renditions of a
‘victimization consciousness’, all three filmmakers bring to the surface of
the image the impossibility of securing an objective singular account of
historical events. Thus to paraphrase Hayden White in another context,
these films depicted the individual’s thoughts about the historical event
rather than the event itself. As Alain Resnais had already demonstrated in
Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad (L’annèe dernière
à Marienbad 1961) thoughts like memories and the terrors of trauma are
fragmentary, incomplete, lingering and subjective. In the films considered
in this chapter, in terms of visual style this translated into the ‘autonomiza-
tion’ of the image, and/or image sequence in which the narrative is cut up
into small segments which ‘take on an independence and autonomy of
their own’ (Jameson 2000: 43).
Yoshida in Eros + Massacre creates multiple pasts through character-
ization as different protagonists from different generations exist, in
Deleuze’s terms, on ‘different plains of memory’ which are by their very
nature, through the process of personification, individual and subjective.
The inclusion of the contemporary characters Eiko and Wada, both
searching in the past for a subjective authenticity as an alternative to the
inauthentic present-future, further complicates the spacialization of time
in these images. In this way, different plains of past-present and future-
present exist within the same frame as when Eiko and Itō Noe meet in
contemporary Shinjuku: both characters personifying different memories
and desires through individual subjectivities. The grand narratives of
nihonjinron – the homogeneous subject defined through ‘collective mem-
ory’ and shared morality – are exposed as historically constructed and
ideological. In Ōshima’s Death by Hanging the ‘autonomization’ of the
narrative is achieved more conventionally through the use of Brechtian
intertitles breaking up the sequences and in Okamoto’s Human Bullet
through the insertion of comic-style drawings and other images which,
while breaking the narrative flow, reinforce a point in the dialogue. As the
sergeant berates the troops, the scene cuts to a manual record player as
the needle is stuck in the groove and the same phrase is repeated until a
hand nudges the needle on and the scene reverts to the now exasperated
sergeant continuing his speech. In Ceremonies the two worlds of the main
protagonist – the main family home and the world of his recollections – are
divided between filming styles: the ‘realism’ of the trip to the island and
the oppression and confinement of the family compound marked by the
stylized artificiality of the set and the colour coding of the lighting.
The questioning of the failures of modern history and its consequences
in relation to the construction of the contemporary 1960s consumer-driven
youth culture of the taiyōzoku generation is a theme common to many
films made both outside and within the mainstream studio system. How-
ever, through visual style it is clear that filmmakers from Japan’s post-war
avant-garde challenged hegemonic humanist victimization narratives of
‘collective memory’. In so doing they did not elide the ‘guilt’ of history,
clearly laying the blame for past catastrophes and the present ideological
chaos onto social institutions such as the Confucian-derived conception of
the extended family (ie), the ideological basis of the nation state (kazoku
kokka) and the ‘assimilation’ (kōminka) policies of the Japanese Empire.
Okamoto Kihachi was one of the first directors working within main-
stream cinema, the Tōhō Studios, to rework the Japanese war experience
in China from an anti-victimization theme. The first film of the popular
The Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu gurentai 1959) series rewrites
Japanese colonial (mis)adventure in China through Hollywood conven-
tions associated with the Western (cowboy) film. As has long been argued,
Hollywood Westerns rewrite the founding of the United States by white
settlers as a myth which expunges the historical realities of white colonial
conquest. Through the theme of the ‘last stand’, in which a group of white
settlers are surrounded by attacking native Americans, the reality of West-
ern colonial usurpation of native lands is inverted as the native American
becomes the aggressor and the white settler the victim, albeit ultimately
triumphant victims, as the cavalry arrive at the last moment to save the day.
But only after the small group, itself a microcosmic cross-section of
stereotypes, have demonstrated their inherently superior moral position,
strength and fortitude.
Desperado Outpost similarly positions the Chinese, in particular the
Chinese Communist soldier (hachirogun), as the aggressor besieging some
remote outpost where the band of Japanese soldiers are based. These men,
outcasts from the mainstream of the Japanese army, have been abandoned
to their fate by corrupt Japanese officers. They are stereotypes of the loner
cowboy heroes who band together to fight a common foe. In this way
the ideological divisions inherent in the ‘victimization’ myth between the
corrupt Japanese officers and ordinary conscripts is maintained. The hero,
played by Satō Makoto (1934–), is a free thinking individual who carries
all the hallmarks of a loner. Disguised as a journalist he travels alone on
horseback deep into Manchuria in order to investigate the truth regarding
the death of a close friend. With his gun strapped to his leg in a holster, he
is a crack shot outperforming his military superiors. The remote outposts
he visits are coded as Western towns replete with saloon-style brothels, the
euphemistically termed ‘comfort stations’ of recent controversy. The
hero’s lovers, the women who work in these ‘comfort stations’, are coded
as the ‘good hearted prostitutes’ of the Western. Like Marlene Dietrich in
Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952), their coding as foreign, that is
Korean, depicts a benign, if not affectionate relationship between colo-
nizer and colonial subject. The fact that this band of men are not doomed,
and resist valiantly against overwhelming Communist forces, rewrites the
‘tragic hero’ of Japanese classical mythology into a Western (pun intended)
narrative of victory. The fact that, in the final sequences, the Chinese
Nationalist Forces fight alongside the outnumbered band of Japanese
irregular soldiers against the Communist Forces further rewrites Japan’s
China War within the post-war political economy of the 1950s Cold
War. Along with the motor-sensory schema of the ‘movement-image’, the
allegory of Japan’s defeat in China is written by the body of the hero as
he maps the terrain of remote northern China on horseback. Built into
the Desperado Outpost films are the seeds of nostalgia and a reactionary
backlash against the criminalization of Japan through defeat which become
more pronounced in later commercial films such as the series of films
made by the Daiei Tokyo Studio between 1959 and 1969 extolling the
various branches of the armed forces directed by Murayama Mitsuo
(1920–1978) (Ah Etajima/Aa Etajima [1959], Ah the Zerosen Fighter
Plane/Aa zerosen [1965], Ah the Hayabusa Army Squadron/Aa rikugun
Hayabusa sentōtai [1969]).
In Yoshida’s films the contemporary world is barren and characterized by

impotence – A Story Written in Water, Flame of Feeling (Honō to onna/
Flamme et femme 1967) and Pilgrim in the Snow (Juhyō no yoromeki/Amours
dans la neige 1968). It would seem that in a consumption-based society
where sexual taboos are breaking down, desire diminishes proportionately.
During the Meiji and Taishō periods, sexual desire outside the institution
of marriage (and outside the regulated and legitimate geisha/prostitution
system), as depicted in Eros + Massacre, was a socio-political taboo
constructed in support of the ‘family state’ and the maintenance of capital-
ist property rights through the system of primogeniture. Ōsugi Sakai’s
transgression of these taboos (his desire to love openly three women)
ultimately determined his death, however, according to the film’s dis-
course, it also ironically freed his desire. In contrast in contemporary 1960s
Japan, the links between the commercialization and the commodification
of sex are made explicit through Eiko’s relationship with the director of
TV commercials. This director, whose function in society is to create
‘desire’ through advertising, will also commit suicide at the end of the
film. He hangs himself from a strip of film after knocking away a stack of
film canisters upon which he is standing.
In an early scene at a television studio, while this director of commer-
cials shoots his advertisement, Eiko and Wada play with matches. Igniting
a match from an already burning one, the pun is upon the word honō which
means both ‘flame’ and ‘sexual desire’. Ōshima in Cruel Story of Youth
used a similar metaphor; Makoto lights glasses containing spirit drinks
on a bar counter experimenting with the ‘flames’ of her fraught sexual
relationship with Kyoshi. This scene is perhaps taken as a quotation from
the Polish film Ashes and Diamonds (Popiól i diament 1958) by Andrzej
Wajda. However, in Ashes and Diamonds the doomed resistance fighter
Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) lights each glass in memory of fallen
comrades and not as in Cruel Story of Youth as an aimless act.
While this chapter focused on films produced through ATG that
thematically challenged dominant representations of the historical event,
the following chapter will consider the films of Imamura Shōhei (1926–
2006) in which he invents an imaginary primeval, ‘originary’ society as
part of a process of ‘overcoming history’. A Japanese critic in an article
about Eros +Massacre compares Yoshida’s approach to history with his
contemporary Imamura.
Yoshida’s rival Imamura Shōhei . . . also uses history to his advantage, he

is most successful in continuing to recount lies as if they were the truth
(hontō rashii) . . . While Yoshida continues to recount narratives in which
the self does not exist, through the law of disavowal (hiteihō) he presses
upon us the non-existence of history and the fact that the ‘me’ of the
past remains in the past and is unconnected to the ‘me’ of the present.
Imamura turns this same premise to his advantage, while seemingly

researching folk traditions he invents people from an originary (kisōteki
ningen) age. Imamura distinguished between the front and the hidden
side of the history of man during the last 200 to 1,000 years, he digs
up the hidden side and creates myths (shinwa). His characters are also
without egos but this is strategic, therefore, along with Yoshida he creates
sexual beings. (Ogawa 1970: 6)
Ogawa continues arguing that, unlike Yoshida, Imamura Shōhei and Adachi
Masao (1939–) are the Japanese inheritors of the French thinker Georges
Bataille. In Eros + Massacre ‘free sex’ and the prostitute are expressions
of the accumulated failures of historiography at the contemporary moment
of an advanced consumer culture, while in films produced by Imamura,
seeming sexual ‘perversions’, as dictated by contemporary standards of
morality, are traditions that have their foundations in nativist originary
social traditions.
Overcoming History:
C HAPTER
HAP TE R
3
Originary Societies,
Pornography and Terrorism
The 1960s, I think, were in a way about the body (nikutai), they were not
about the Party or power politics, the 1960s were I feel about the body.
(Yoshida 1971: 121)
In these originary societies people devour each other, therefore in

Pigs and Battleships, the people eat the pig that ate the corpse. Hence the
link to nature and insect societies. (Ogawa 1964: 66)
W
hile Ōshima Nagisa (1932–) in Ceremonies (Gishiki
1971), from the perspective of the ruling bureaucratic
classes, takes up problems associated with the Confu-
cian-derived extended family structure defined as the ie and its ideological
reconceptualization in the late nineteenth century as the ‘family state’,
Yoshida (Kijū) Yoshishige (1933–) in Eros + Massacre (Erosu + gyakusatsu
1970) tackles related themes from the perspective of the intellectual classes
through the philosophies of the political anarchist Ōsugi Sakai (1885–
1923) and his feminist lovers Itō Noe (1895–1923) and the disguised
Kamichika Ichiko (1888–1981). Both films comment on the present while
challenging the grand narratives of historiography through critiques of the
past as it impacts on the lives of contemporary characters. Within these
narratives, sexuality, in particular male impotence, becomes allegoric of
the barrenness of contemporary consumerist culture through which desire
is commoditized, a theme to which this chapter will return. In contrast,
Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006) who like Yoshida and Ōshima also began
his working career as an assistant director at the Shōchiku Studios before
moving to Nikkatsu in 1954, while addressing similar issues, does so from
the perspective of characters, often female, from the lowest level of the
social hierarchy in, for example, Pigs and Battleships (Buta to gunkan
1961), Insect Woman (Nippon konchūki 1963), Intentions of Murder (Akai
— 79 —
satsui 1964), A Man Vanishes (Ningen jōhatsu 1967) and Post-War History
of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon sengoshi madamu Onboro no
seikatsu 1970).
Toita explains that one of the main themes of Imamura’s films ‘is
the extent to which the ie stifles natural affection and is closed off from
society’. He continues; other directors have also
taken this standpoint on the question of the ie. However, Imamura digs
deep into the base of the ie to primitive human urges . . . To what extent
do people in their lives adhere to irrational beliefs in phallic cults and
mountain gods; life lived half buried in the ground like an insect, or life
lived with sexual instincts like those of an insect; to what extent does this
have meaning for us, for contemporary man? (Toita 1964: 91)
In contrast to the modern nuclear family of advanced capitalist,

industrial societies where ostensibly the relationship between the husband
and wife is central, in the case of the traditional extended family, the
parent–child relationship is paramount. Derived from a pre-modern feudal
economy, the aristocratic (samurai) class agrarian extended family was
transformed in the late nineteenth century into an expanded ie system as
part of the processes, of what Lehmann refers to as the samuraization of
the lower classes.1 Within this ie system, historically, the economic and
political imperatives of the family as an institution have determined
marriage partners through the miai system of marriage interviews. When
defined as an economic and political unit, marriage within this system
is conceived of in terms of the provision of the next generation and not
as a vehicle for the emotional fulfilment and sexual gratification of the
individuals concerned. As a corollary, within this system children are
ranked according to their status in terms of obligations and property rights.
It was precisely this system of ranking which, during Japan’s first phase of
industrialization, provided the ethical basis upon which daughters from
poor families could be indentured into factory labour and various forms of
prostitution: a theme poignant to the narrative of the Ballad of Narayama
(Narayama bushikō 1983) and the 1975 documentary Karayukisan. In
terms of sons, the first born was destined to inherit, with the property, the
leadership role as head of household. Secondary sons, like daughters
would marry outside the natal home, or from the early twentieth century
on, were educated and expected to establish independent branch families;
their education often being financed through the indenture of their sisters
Originary Societies, Pornography and Terrorism 81
to factories or brothels. Within this system the long-term good of the ie as

an institution takes precedence over individual desire; hence the classic
dichotomy between giri and ninjō – obligation and human desires – that
drives the narrative of many mainstream genre films.
As is discussed in the previous chapter, Ceremonies makes a direct
link between Japan’s historical ambitions on the Asian mainland and the
ie system which the film condemns as oppressive and degrading to the
individual, hence the wedding sequence in which no bride is present. This
scene highlights the absurdities of a system that places institutional goals
at a premium, while ignoring the human desires and needs of the individu-
als who have to exist within its structures. If marriage within this system is
purely symbolic of economic and political imperatives, then the ceremony
can proceed without the individuals concerned. In the subsequent scene
following the sham wedding ceremony when Masuo (Kawarasaki Kenzō
1943–) substitutes his grandfather for his absent bride and simulates their
first night together, the film depicts the human cost that this system extracts
from those who live within its confines. In contrast, in films produced by
Imamura the wedding ‘ceremony’ is absent. Characters in the marginalized
societies depicted in his films come together as a result of spontaneous
(sometimes violent) sexual unions – The Pornographers (Erogotoshitachi
yori jinruigaku nyūmon 1966), Intentions of Murder, Profound Desire of the
Gods (Kamigami no fukaki yokubō 1968) and The Ballad of Narayama.
While in thematic terms, as Toita explains above, in films directed by
Imamura there are clear similarities with regard to concerns about the
socio-political impact of the Japanese family structure, the ie, on individu-
als living in the contemporary age of advanced capitalism, however, in
terms of both narrative and visual style, there is a clear distinction between
films directed by Imamura, and those of Yoshida and Ōshima. This can best
be understood in terms of cinematic methodology and the philosophical
basis that underpin their various methodologies of representation. In short,
Imamura’s approach is underscored by a ‘naturalist’ viewpoint derived
from the study of the natural sciences and ethnography, in particular the
ethnographic instigator of Japanese folklore studies in the early twentieth
century, Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962). As Imamura explains:
Naturally I was influenced by American films, but when I became a

director and produced plans I disliked the thought of making American-
style films. When thinking about alternatives, I remembered Yanagita
Kunio. I then shot two or three films based on material I collected that
pivoted on theories of the culture of the common people (jōmin bunkaron),

from that perspective how should we view the present day? From earliest
times, there existed a consciousness stemming from folkways (minzoku),
local customs (dozoku) and strange customs (izoku). (Imamura 2001: 40)
Where Imamura returned to ‘nativist’ Japanese sources, Yoshida’s and

Ōshima’s approach, as has been argued in the previous chapters, is that of
the phenomenologist who focuses on our consciousness of ‘objects’ rather
than the ‘objects’ themselves.
This chapter will focus on an analysis of the films produced by
Imamura in the 1960s as sites where female sexuality is renegotiated
through reinvented ‘nativist’ traditions that ostensibly predate Japan’s
modernization and, in Imamura’s fictional world, still linger beneath the
surface of contemporary Japanese society. This will then feed into a
discussion of the culturally constructed nature of sexuality and its obverse,
‘obscenity’, both in terms of social morality, and in Law, as defined
by censorship through an analysis of the debate around the court case
involving Takechi Tetsuji’s ‘pink’ film Black Snow (Kuroi yuki 1965). The
chapter will conclude with a discussion of films directed by Wakamatsu
Kōji (1936–) and Ōshima Nagisa with an emphasis on those penned
by Adachi Masao (1939–). In all cases, through discourses on sexual trans-
gression, criminality and terrorist acts against the State, there is a desire
to overcome the narratives of history being institutionalized through
the major studios in complicity with the post-war conservatism of the
American global hegemony into which the ruling Japanese Liberal
Democratic Party had inserted itself.
The Sacred and the Profane

In his article on Imamura Shōhei, Donald Richie makes an astute
distinction between ‘official’ Japan and the ‘real’ version:
[T]he ‘official’ version, the often beautiful world of the Noh and the
tea ceremony, the subservient kimono-clad woman, the feudality of
exquisitely graded degrees of social standing, and such approved virtues
as fidelity, loyalty, devotion – in short anything which the outside world
knows of Japan. This is the ‘official’ version because it is also the
exported version and it is this world which is shown the visitor. At the
same time, however, it is truly ‘official’ in that it is approved by society.
This is the way that Japanese society likes to see itself, whether or not it
actually happens to be like this. (Richie 1997: 8)
This ‘official’ version, Richie argues is exemplified in the films of Ozu

Yasujirō (1903–1963). He continues:
The other Japan might, judging from Imamura’s films be called the ‘real’
version. His people . . . do not behave like ‘Japanese’ because none of the
rules of order and decorum insisted upon by the official version apply.
These people, always from the so-called lower classes, do not know the
meaning of fidelity or loyalty. They are completely natural and are to that
extent ‘uncivilized’ if civilization means (as it does) a removal from the
natural. They are selfish, lusty, amoral, innocent, natural and all of the
vitality of Japan comes from their numbers. (Richie 1997: 8)
One of the key ideological fields of debate to which Japanese

avant-garde filmmakers contributed in the 1960s and 1970s was related
to definitions of what it is to be Japanese. In academic circles, this debate
manifests in dubious theories known collectively as nihonjinron or ‘dis-
cussions of what it is to be Japanese’.2 These ranged from psychological
studies which claimed Japanese people had unique capacities to empa-
thize, constructed around the concept of amaeru (Doi 1981), to studies on
the uniquely group-orientated social structures of Japanese society (Nakane
1972). As part of the reinvention of a post-war national identity, central to
all these debates was the desire to differentiate Japan from the ‘other’ of
primarily Western societies and cultures. As such, they took on a distinctly
comparative aspect. Historically, these debates grew out of genuine
fears that, since the war and defeat, Japanese national identity was being
eroded through the importation of Western political concepts of the state,
democracy, consumerism, society and morality. These were all issues that
not only concerned intellectuals on the left of politics, but also the right-
leaning novelist, intellectual and sometimes filmmaker Mishima Yukio
(1925–1970). In the cinema, as Richie correctly points out, this manifested
in the construction of visual myths of ‘Japaneseness’, or the ‘official’ ver-
sion. Within this context, Imamura’s reappraisal of the folklore studies
of Yanagita Kunio is logical, as Yanagita was motivated to pursue his
research into folk culture at a time when Japan was industrializing in the
early twentieth century; indeed, he sought to discover elements of tradition
that would explain Japan’s distinctive ‘national character’. While Yanagita,
as Harootunian has demonstrated, sought to free the social imagination

from the constraints of the Meiji State, Imamura similarly applies
Yanagita’s theoretical paradigm to free the cinematic imagination from the
constraints of the ‘official version’ perpetuated through the major studios:
‘In the context of late Meiji, [Yanagita] was able to offer another version
of the life history of ordinary folk that claimed greater authenticity than
the recent narrative announced by the state’ (Harootunian 1990: 103).
Imamura similarly sought an alternative to the ‘national character’ depicted
in the Shōchiku-style shōshimingeki (films about the lower middle classes).
To describe the social class of the characters that populate his films he
brought back into use the term kisō shakai which Katori defines as follows:
‘Kisō shakai is an unfamiliar term today. In other words it refers to people
at the bottom of the social hierarchy in the provinces (chihō), the country
(inaka), out-of-the-way places (hekichi), and remote outlying regions
(henkyō) as well as criminals’ (Katori 2004: 9).
The themes and visual motifs Richie lists in the quotation above
became central to melodramatic genres centred on the family made by,
among others, Ozu Yasujirō of Shōchiku and Naruse Mikio (1905–1969)
of Tōhō, or the yakuza (Japanese mafia) films produced in prodigious
numbers by the Tōei Studios right through the latter half of the 1960s
(Abashiri Prison/Abashiri bangaichi series 1965–1973, Tales of Japanese
Chivalry/Nihon kyōkakuden series 1964–1971 and Remnants of Chivalry
in the Shōwa Era/Shōwa zankyōden series 1965–1972), and on television,
through the reinvention of pre-war classic samurai dramas (jidaigeki)
around heroic characters such as Mito Kōmon and Tōyama no Kinsan.
The first series of Mito Kōmon began in 1969 and continues to this
day and was reported as being a favourite of the now deceased Shōwa
Emperor (Hirohito).
Avant-garde filmmakers, in particular, Imamura Shōhei, contest this
hegemonic ‘official’ version, or definition, of what essentially it is to be
Japanese in an increasingly American-dominated global socio-economic
and cultural milieu. While the ‘official version’ sought its foundations,
as Richie correctly identifies, in an ideological conception of a feudal
historiography derived from Neo-Confucian moral precepts and political
structures imported from China to the elite classes of Japan, and further
modified along Christian lines in the late nineteenth century as Japan
entered the international arena, Imamura in Insect Woman, Profound
Desire of the Gods and The Ballad of Narayama constructs a fictitious
pre-modern, timeless society founded on shamanistic beliefs and Shintō-

derived mountain gods. As Katori explains:
Imamura’s main films were made in the period from the ruin of defeat to
the period of high economic growth. People moved from the provinces
(chihō) to the cities, there was a mass migration as the economy rapidly
transformed from agriculture to industry. (Katori 2004: 10)
He continues, people began to see that ‘saying goodbye to the old Japan
and embracing the democracy imported with the American occupation
forces was an illusion’ (sakkaku). He explains:
[I]t was not so simple to break an essentialist Japaneseness (Nihonteki na

mono) that had been engendered over a long time and was rooted in the
very depths of Japanese people. Local customs deep in the Japanese
people’s psyche; distinctions between good and bad exist in the hearts of
the common people in marginalized village societies. Even with the
destruction of the war and the sufferings of defeat, nothing changed very
much. (Katori 2004: 10)
Thematically, as Ogawa points out: ‘while seemingly researching folk

traditions [Imamura] invents marginalized, originary (kisōteki) societies.
Imamura distinguished between the front and the hidden side of the
history of man during the last 200 to 1,000 years, he digs up the hidden
side and creates myths (shinwa)’ (Ogawa 1970: 6). Imamura argues that
‘myths’ (shinwa) are like the subconsciousness of a race. Here he makes
a distinction between ‘nation’ (kokka) and ‘race’ (minzoku), however, he
goes on to say that ‘in the case of the Yamato race, it adheres extremely
closely to the nation’ (Imamura 2001: 58). As such, an understanding of
Japan’s myths, in Imamura’s terms, leads to an understanding of Japanese
contemporary society. Katori elaborates:
There were certain people who claimed that under the lead of American
‘democracy’ Japan had changed, but Imamura thought that if the con-
sciousness of the common people which is constructed from the base
part of society (kisō bubun) did not change, then Japanese people would
not change. (Katori 2004: 141–142)
The problem as Imamura saw it was not only the importation of

Western political and social ideals but in the economic and cultural divi-
sions between the city and the country. In the city, immigrants from the
countryside were cut off from their roots and left lonely and isolated in
uniform urban apartment blocks. He saw the placement of local Shintō
deities (ujigami) on new buildings and apartment blocks (danchi) as a
desire to re-create a sense of the lost hometown (kokyō). He continues:
Amidst the urban block-like (heisoku mitai) single accommodation of

the block-like housing estates, is born an unbearable sense of poverty,
rupture and isolation. It seems to me that somehow people wanted to
create a sense of solidarity in the form of the hometown. After having
abandoned the ‘hometown’, at last, in order to form some sort of
apartment block cultural life, they wanted to re-create a form of the
hometown and found they needed a local Shintō deity. This community
god is extremely convenient for communal interests and service, but as
for saving individual souls (tamashii) it has no connection. (Imamura
2001: 59)
As Harootunian posits in relation to the founding of Japanese folklore

studies in the early 1900s by Yanagita, but equally applicable to the post-
war resurgence of interest in the subject:
[E]thnology was formulated to challenge a conception of society based

upon exchange and contractual arrangements necessary to the develop-
ment of capitalist forms of economic activity, by calling attention to a
social image that had prevailed prior to the organization of contemporary
society and whose fundamental elements continued to persist uneasily in
the present. (Harootunian 1990: 120)
After My Second Brother (Nianchan 1959) and Pigs and Battleships,

and from Insect Woman on, the visual style of Imamura’s films shifts
significantly to a docu-ethnographic observation of the characters’ lives.
Indeed the Japanese title of Imamura’s 1966 film released in the West
simply as The Pornographers, in fact translates as An Introduction to the
Study of Anthropology: According to Masters of the Erotic (Erogotoshitachi
yori jinruigaku nyūmon). The film-within-a-film structure positions us in
the opening and closing sequences of The Pornographers as an audience
watching a film while the three main male protagonists, the ‘masters of the
erotic’ of the Japanese title, discuss the sequences depicted. Furthermore,
many scenes are filmed in long shot through windows with the sound over-
laid. Glass continually separates the spectator from the objects of study
and close-ups are rarely utilized.
In terms of etymology, human life is likened to that of insects. This is
overt in the 1963 film Insect Woman which opens with a close-up of a
beetle struggling through the sand followed by an enlarged freeze frame as
the title appears on the screen, but is also evident in Intentions of Murder.
Sadako (Harukawa Masumi 1935–) raises silkworms while working in
the main house as a girl. The silkworms are her only physical contact with
living creatures as she entices one along her thigh with a mulberry leaf.
The inclusion of ‘naturalist’ sequences also punctuates his later films The
Profound Desire of the Gods and, most famously, his Cannes-winning The
Ballad of Narayama. This framing of human society within the parameters
of a research project of the natural world should be distinguished from the
‘social realist’ traditions of, for example, Shindō Kaneto’s (1912–) films
of the early 1960s The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima 1960) and Human
(Ningen 1962). In 1964 Teshigahara Hiroshi (1927–) made similar etymo-
logical connections in the film version of Abe Kōbō’s 1962 novel Woman
of the Dunes (Suna no onna).
Imamura’s female characters, from Tome (Hidari Sachiko 1930–2001)
of Insect Woman to Toriko (Okiyama Hideko 1945–) and Uma (Matsui
Yasuko 1939–) from The Profound Desire of the Gods, represent a ‘primi-
tive’ image of female sexuality free from the taboos of modern society.
Therefore, in marked contrast to the contemporary characters in Eros +
Massacre, Eiko and Wada, and Shizuo of Story Written in Water (Mizu de
kakareta monogatari/Histoire écrite par l’eau Yoshida Yoshishige 1965),
all of whom are afflicted with varying degrees of sexual impotence,
Imamura’s characters in the films mentioned above, devoid of a modern
social sensibility, appear to have an exaggerated sexual energy which spills
over into quasi-incestual relationships.
If male sexual impotence is a powerful metaphor for the human
failures of post-war Japanese society in the films of Yoshida, Ōshima and
Hani Susumu’s (1928–) The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi jigokuhen
1968), in the films directed by Imamura, incest becomes a central trope.
Ōshima in Ceremonies uses incest metaphorically to explore the claustro-
phobic nature of the ie family structure as a political unit; all the characters
in the film have a blood link to Masuo’s grandfather (Satō Kei 1928–).
Even Terumichi (Nakamura Otsuo 1940–) was the result of an illicit
(presumably) forced sexual encounter between the grandfather and his
son’s fiancée. However, in the films of Imamura incestual and quasi-
incestual relationships become a key trope through which personal bonds
of belonging within the extended family are reinforced.
The main female protagonists in Insect Woman, Intentions of Murder
and The Profound Desire of the Gods all have a pervasive sense of
authenticity that predates the advent of the modern socio-political world.
In spatial terms their position in marginalized societies is symbolized
through geography, as these characters have their origins in the remote
northern parts of the main island, Honshu, or in the remote southern islands
of the Okinawan archipelago. Ogawa writing in the journal Film Art (Eiga
Geijutsu) in 1964 after the release of Intentions of Murder explains:
Imamura, from time to time, uses the phrase ‘originary society’ (kisō
shakai) when speaking of people at the bottom level of the social hierar-
chy (teihen). According to [the academic] Matsushita Keiichi, this group
comprises two thirds of the Japanese population, it is a society that
has no relationship to the formation of history nor does it participate in
history; it is a way of life where fathers and daughters sleep naked
cramped together (zakone). It is a matter of course that incest occurs. In
such circumstances, affection (ai) develops through incestual relation-
ships, other forms of love (ren’ai), are they not fake? (Ogawa 1964: 66)
Women, the working class and criminals became central allegories in

this quest to re-establish the primacy of the private over the public, nature
over culture, the countryside over the city, the intuitive over the rational.
Women, due to popular conceptions of female identity as predicated on
the sexualized body linked to ‘nature’, are, therefore, capable of existing
outside capitalist industrial society, as are the working class because, as
Richie points out, they ‘remain even now untouched by the rationalization,
hypocrisy and face-saving which characterizes their betters’. In terms
of politics Tome whose life begins in remote Honshu in the year Taishō
seven (1918) exists outside of history as she misses the Emperor’s radio
broadcast announcing the end of the war, as she is engaged in sex. Twice
in Tokyo she is confronted by demonstrations, the May Day Incident
of 19523 and the 15 June 1960 Anpo Demonstration, to which she is
indifferent. In both cases they have a nuisance factor as they delay her get-
ting to her destination.
The implied trope of incest within the discourses of Imamura’s films
Insect Woman, Profound Desire of the Gods and The Ballad of Narayama
is not presented as a social taboo precisely because concepts of the patri-
archy and paternal ownership do not exist in the mind of Chūji (Kitamura
Kazuo 1927–), the father figure in Insect Woman. The pre-modern mise-
en-scène of rural northern Japan depicted in Insect Woman is presided
over by the Shintō mountain god, a female deity who does not recognize
patrimony. Within the life of this remote northern village the mountain
deity is sexually active as Chūji carves a wooden phallus for her as a
festival offering. He tells the young Tome that she cannot give the god this
offering as the deity is female. While this village society upholds hetero-
sexuality as the norm, Tome cannot, due to her female status, make the
phallic offering, however, this does not confine women’s sexuality within
marriage. Within this conception of society women do not live under rules
of monogamy and Chūji’s claiming of Tome as his child is based on bonds
of affection rather than on a blood-linked connection. Hence his sexually
charged relationship with Tome in her later life is not in fact biologically
speaking incest as we know she is probably not really his child. Also, in
The Ballad of Narayama women of the village are not the sole preserve of
their husbands. Tatsuhei (Ogata Ken 1937–), the eldest son and ostensible
head of the household, asks his wife to sleep with his younger brother who
through his frustrated sexual desire is disrupting social relations within
the village. Again secondary sons, for the sake of, in this case, survival of
the family and the village community are not permitted to marry. The harsh
reality of the world depicted in the film is that the village population must
be held at a certain level to avoid famine, therefore, marriage is restricted,
infanticide practiced, daughters sold to the cities as indentured labour or
into prostitution, and old people exposed to die on the mountain. The many
scenes of animals mating and nature link the social world of the village
and rules governing familial relations to primitive needs of survival.
Historically, it was only as land became scarce that a system of primo-
geniture was imported along with the political and ideological foundations
of Confucianism into Japan in the tenth century. Inheritance issues associ-
ated with the samurai class impacted on women at two levels, their loss of
the right to inherit property, and with the implementation of a system
of male-based primogeniture, women’s sexuality increasingly became
confined within monogamous family structures. Equally, it was only in the

modern age when the very basis of these Confucian-derived patriarchal
structures were being eroded by industrial capitalism and urbanization that
the system of the koseki, or family register, was extended to all families
and institutionalized in law under the Civil Code of 1898.4 Within the
remote northern village where Chūji lives with his family, modernization,
Meiji concepts of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ along with occupation
and post-war ‘reforms’ have passed the inhabitants by. This is enhanced by
Chūji’s ‘simpleton’ status, which within the film is not coded as negative,
but marks him as innocent and links him more closely to nature through
the mountain deity and the pre-modern ideal. The scorn the clerks at the
municipal office pour on Chūji when he comes to register Tome’s birth
under his family koseki highlights the differences between the sophisti-
cated and educated clerks and the innocent Chūji who does not understand
their taunts as he is living a different reality.
Chūji’s status as mentally simple implies that he can still exist in a
pre-rational and pre-scientific world oblivious to the taunts of the munici-
pal clerks and oblivious to his wife’s infidelities. When Tome, as a child,
questions his relationship to her mother, it is clear that Chūji’s conception
of marriage is not a modern one. He only becomes angry when Tome’s
mother attempts to marry her off for material gain and thereby threatens
their relationship. Within this social context, the ‘tribe’ as Desser describes
it, this quasi-incestual relationship is the basis of human bonding and not
the subject of social taboo. Therefore, as Shimizu argues, Chūji’s death
scene, in which the now middle-aged and sexually active Tome gives him
her breast, is not ‘immoral’.
Just before he dies, Chūji coughs out the word chichi [breast]. A word
Nobuko [Tome’s daughter] could not catch. Tome, who immediately
understands, without a word removes her kimono and without the
slightest hesitation gives him her breast. Chūji, who with trembling lips
sucks the breast, soon breathes his last. Chūji’s death is probably the
ultimate death for a man. All men at the time of their deaths would want
to go that way. (Shimizu 2001: 134)
Despite the audacity of the much discussed ‘incest’ themes in these films,
Imamura still stays within the bounds of modern social conceptions of the
taboo in that relationships between daughters and father figures are not
genetically linked as both are clearly stepfathers.
The links to shamanism and mountain deities takes the film narratives
back to Japan’s incestual founding myths and matriarchal origins. Although
according to the rules of primogeniture Tatsuhei is ostensibly the head of
the household in The Ballad of Narayama, in point of fact, it is his mother,
Orin (Sakamoto Sumiko 1936–), who controls the family. It is Orin who
arranges the second wife for the widowed Tatsuhei – she also arranges a
sexual encounter for her third son – and it is Orin who understands the
need for her own abandonment on the mountain when she reaches the age
of 70. The rural social relations depicted in these films are brought
into sharp focus and often clash with the changes implemented during
occupation and consolidated during the period of high economic growth.
Where the distortions of male/female relationships in Yoshida’s vision of
contemporary society has led to a form of sexual impotence, in Imamura’s
films set in rural locations the absence of taboos and mores represents a
form of clannish affection where exogamous bonding is seen as infidelity.
Through the links to nativist religions and founding myths, these sexual
bondings within the extended matriarchal family are justified in nature
through images of insects and reptiles. In reminiscing of his experiences in
the ‘black-market’ (yamiichi) days of the post-defeat period, Imamura
makes the following comments which in part explains the centrality of
women to his films:
I was eighteen at the end of the war. During the war women remained
formal, tense and strong and never expressed their true selves (hon’ne),
in the burnt-out black market at the end of the war, I was astonished to
see the true selves of the women I came into contact with, which while
living in the black market, they could express for the first time. Even
though grandmothers, mothers and elder sisters were part of a family,
always, it is the women who have the real power, because of this, my
respect (ikei) for women was strong. If women had to use their bodies as
weapons in order to obtain rice then that was fine. After all there was no
other way. (Imamura 2001: 234)
The Pornographers
By the mid-1960s, various industry factors including a marked decline in
audience numbers, and changes in film distribution and import practices
had a profound impact on film content. In the public realm, three incidents
regarding soft-core pornographic ‘pink’ films sparked a violent debate in
newspapers and film-related journals on what was considered permissible

content.
In economic terms, the 1960s were characterized by a period of high
economic growth and a return to the world stage of international politics
through the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, during which time, the ‘official ver-
sion’ of the new post-war Japan was presented to a world-wide audience.
Television, which had begun transmission in 1953, continued to make
inroads into film audiences in the 1960s. In 1959, at the time of the Crown
Prince’s wedding, NHK subscriptions rose to 3,460,000 and by 1962
had reached the ten-million mark, which translated into 48.5 per cent of
households owning a television (Usui 1998: 24). Shōchiku, which had
historically focused on the production of melodramas appealing to a
predominantly female audience, suffered badly as married women, often
confined to the far-flung conurbations of the apartment block housing
estates of the newly forming middle-class salarymen, stayed at home and
watched the television. Young unmarried women, the ubiquitous office
ladies (OL), remained an important audience group, but they tended to
patronize theatres specializing in Hollywood and European films. As a
result, Shōchiku which had been the highest-grossing company in 1951
was by 1958 pushed into third place by Daiei. By 1961, the first major
company, Shin Tōhō, had collapsed. A decade later the Daiei studios ceased
operations and Nikkatsu was reduced to specializing in soft-core por-
nography with their romanporno genre. However, as Matsushima (2000)
points out, it was not only television that impinged on box-office receipts
but new forms of leisure and consumption commensurate with a society in
a period of high economic growth.
As box-office takings continued to decline in the 1960s, the major
studios sought ever new sensational grounds to attract back audiences
which in many instances manifested in increasingly risqué and explicit
depictions of sex and violence. Despite a decline in audience attendance
at the major studios’ cinema chains, the number of domestic films pro-
duced still remained high, due to an increase in low-budget independent
productions. By 1965, the ‘pink’ film accounted for 40 per cent of
domestic production (Satō 1996 vol. iii: 75). Also, as has been discussed
above, and at the opposite extreme, the ATG, which began as a distribution
company specializing in foreign films with a series of small ‘art house’
cinemas, had by the mid-1960s begun assisting with the production of
independent Japanese films. Therefore, by 1970 the major studios had cut
their production to half that of 1958.
In 1964, while most soft-core pornographic films, commonly referred

to as ‘pink’ films, were screened in small seedy backstreet cinemas in the
main entertainment districts, two films by the director Takechi Tetsuji
(1912–1988) – Daydream (Hakujitsumu 1964) and Dream of the Red
Chamber (Kōkeimu 1964) – were released as a double bill in mainstream
Shōchiku cinemas thus blurring the distinctions between the mainstream
and the burgeoning independent soft-core pornographic film industry.
In an attempt to win back audiences with an appeal to prurient interests,
Shōchiku both produced and released films with risqué content, however,
these films were based on respected novels. Thus in the following year,
1965, Shōchiku continued this policy by releasing two films based on
novels by Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) – Snow Country (Yuki guni
director: Ōba Hideo) and The Beauty and the Sorrow (Utsukushisa to
kanashimi to director: Shinoda Masahiro). Therefore, Matsushima (2000)
argues that, strictly speaking, it was difficult to classify the two Takechi
films as ‘pink’. Although the female parts were taken by known ‘pink’
actresses featured in ‘the master of the erotic’ Wakamatsu Kōji productions,
the male lead was played by Ishihama Akira (1935–) who was one of
Shōchiku’s ‘youth film’ stars and who had appeared in films made by main-
stream directors such as Kinoshita Keisuke (1912–1998) and Kobayashi
Masaki (1916–1996). Furthermore, Daydream and Dream of the Red
Chamber were both based on novels by the respected author Tanizaki
Junichirō (1886–1965).
The release of these films as a double bill in mainstream cinemas
sparked a furious debate in Japanese newspapers and journals regarding
the ‘erotic’ and indeed what constituted ‘obscenity’ – the ‘ideology of
eroticism’ (erotishizumu no shisō) as one Film Art article was titled in
November 1964. This article was just one of many written in response to
the respected daily newspaper, the Asahi Shinbun’s editorials, condemning
Takechi’s films. This was further compounded by the release a year later
of Takechi’s anti-American ‘military base film’ Black Snow. Set around
the Yokota US military base, the film centres on the son of a brothel madam
who caters exclusively to American service personnel; according to
Matsushima (2000) the use of the term ‘anti-American peoples’ film’
(hanbei minzokushugi eiga) to describe these ‘base’ films dates from this
period. On 9 June 1965 the film opened across the country in Nikkatsu
cinemas. On 16 June, the police seized all prints under Article 175 of
the ‘obscenity’ law. Takechi and the head of the Nikkatsu distribution
office were duly charged. In July 1966 the case was brought to court
and the debate centred on the question ‘Is the film art or is it obscene?’
(geijitsu ka, waisetsu ka).
In a brief article in the journal Film Art published in October 1966,
Takechi explains his motives in making the film:
I made this film because I wanted to make an appeal to the people through
art about the political state of affairs in which Japan is enmeshed, the
feeling of crisis about the Vietnam War occurring in the Pacific, and
claims of nationalism. At the time I announced this film, public opinion
regarding the Vietnam War and Japanese people’s thinking about the
war crisis began to increase and become more serious. These were my
reasons for making the film Black Snow. (Takechi 1966: 23–24)
Takechi continues pointing out that the film is now under attack from
‘reactionaries’ (handōshugisha) who are masking their assault on ‘free-
dom of expression’ through charges brought under the ‘obscenity’ law.
Here Takechi is highlighting one of the great contradictions inherent in
Japanese censorship laws. Under the new post-war Constitution of 1947,
freedom of political expression was guaranteed. However in practice, film,
like art and literature, was considered entertainment rather than expression
and routinely subjected to administrative scrutiny under the ‘public
welfare’. As Beer explains:
In general terms, a 1950 Supreme Court statement reflects the spirit of

self-disciplined liberty in the Constitution: ‘[T]he maintenance of order
and respect for the fundamental human rights – it is precisely these things
which constitute the content of the public welfare.’ The courts use the
clause as a positive law standard, not merely as a hortatory statement of
an ideal. (Beer 1993: 224)
Alexander continues explaining that the Japanese courts have been

consistent in their rulings, ‘confirming the policy that protection of the
public welfare through censorship of obscenity is not a violation of free
expression guarantees’ (Alexander 2003: 156, emphasis in the original).
As Alexander elaborates, in adopting this position,
[n]either government administrators nor the courts were legally

compelled to specify what constituted ‘obscene’ material and how
it offended public decorum, since their authority in this realm was
subsumed under their general responsibilities to protect the public welfare

in ways they deemed appropriate. (Alexander 2003: 154, emphasis mine)
As such, the debate centred on the question ‘Is Black Snow art or is it
obscene?’ The controversy about the film brought together strange
alliances that crossed left and right political lines as both Ōshima Nagisa
and Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) spoke for the defence. Mishima
made the following statement drawing comparisons with his own ATG
production, Patriotism (Yūkoku), which was released in 1966:
In the case of Patriotism, the sexuality of people caught in a political

situation was raised to the highest level of beauty, but in the case of Black
Snow it is the exact opposite. This film expresses the sexuality of people
caught in a different political situation in which their sexuality has
become distorted in the extreme . . . Sexuality as it becomes distorted is
presented in an ugly form, as the audience watches this they begin to
understand the causes of the distortion. In this way this film appeals to an
anti-American sentiment and it becomes clear that this film was made
with this purpose in mind. (Mishima quoted in Matsushima 2001: 120,
Film Art/Eiga Geijutsu vol. 14, no. 236, May 1967: 62, and Eiga Hyōron
May 1967: 99)
The comparison with Patriotism is most apt. Where Patriotism, set

in 1936, upholds bushidō ethics, ethics being repackaged to underpin
Japan’s new corporate warrior, the salaryman, Black Snow confronts the
destructive influences the US military presence has on contemporary
1960s Japanese society through the main male character, the 19-year-old
son of the brothel madam, Jirō, who, reduced to a state of sexual impotence,
sublimates his frustration onto violence, first, murdering a black American
serviceman who had frequented his mother’s establishment before stealing
20,000 dollars from his aunt and murdering her. His aunt, being the pro-
prietor of a bar in partnership with an American soldier, sells alcohol
and tobacco stolen from the US military base stores, making a handsome
profit for herself and her GI lover. Where Patriotism, set on the classical
Noh stage, depicts the ‘pure’ love of a young idealistic Japanese officer
and his bride, Black Snow contrasts the ‘impure’ sexual relations of
American GIs and Japanese prostitutes, which are the cause of the son
of the establishment’s impotence. When Jirō does form an attachment to
a ‘pure’ young girl, his only option is to arrange to substitute one of
his criminal colleagues, in the darkness of the room, to fulfil his sexual
role. Thematically, while Patriotism was clearly produced as an historical
allegory (based on the 26 February 1936 Incident) with a political message
to the youth of 1960s Japan, according to Takechi’s statement, Black Snow
was similarly produced as an ‘appeal to the people through art about
the political state of affairs in which Japan is enmeshed’. As such, Black
Snow confronts many of the political themes of the day – the military
bases, opposition to nuclear weapons, the student movement and the
Vietnam War.
In stylistic terms, while Black Snow plays upon long takes panning
over entwined bodies to which the court took exception, Mishima’s film
fragments the two bodies cutting them up into fetished segments. There
are only two stylized long shots of the couple naked on a dais in front of a
large calligraphy with the characters for shisei meaning ‘sincerity and
devotion’. Black Snow similarly positions naked bodies, not however on a
dais, but in a prostitute’s bed. The opening sequence shot in a long take
panning a naked black male body sleeping entwined on a pale Japanese
female body would suggest that miscegenation and not nudity was the
cause of the offence. Similarly, when the ‘pure’ love interest of Jirō flees
in a distressed state from the brothel after realizing she has lost her virgin-
ity to Jirō’s accomplice and not to Jirō whom she loves, it is the backdrop
against which she runs, the perimeter fence of the Yokota base, that again
is, I would suggest, the source of offence and not the nudity. In the final
sequences it is the old taxi driver, father of the innocent love interest, who
carries some of the responsibility for the contemporary situation in a long
soliloquy made in the final scenes of the film before the protagonist is led
to his execution:
Taxi driver: During the war, I was a lecturer at a Manchurian University.

After the war, after that painful end, I was a refugee. Both my wife and my
son died in the evacuation . . . As a lecturer, I am deeply ashamed of the
crimes I committed. Because of me, many young people died and unhappy
children like you were born.
Compounding the complexities of these debates were changing

regulations regarding the importation of foreign films deemed to contain
explicit images. Historically, imported films came under the jurisdiction of
Customs’ laws and domestic productions under ‘public health’. Initially,
as Alexander explains, domestic ‘pink’ films were protected from their
more explicit foreign counterparts through Customs’ practices of radical

cutting and masking of offending scenes often making foreign films
unintelligible. However, as European and American films became
increasingly explicit through the 1960s, Alexander argues:
[A]s Customs granted imported films more latitude in both content

and explicitness, the market for film consumption in Japan became
bifurcated, with domestic films governed internally by film producers
through Eirin [Commission for the Administration of the Motion Picture
Code of Ethics], and more explicit foreign films approved for domestic
showing by Customs. This pressured domestic filmmakers to ease their
self-imposed standards in order to compete with foreign films for a
consuming public that wanted to see more explicit and challenging films.
(Alexander 2003: 159)
In the same year, and adding fuel to these debates, Wakamatsu Kōji’s
‘pink’ film Secrets behind the Wall (Kabe no naka no hiji 1965) was
selected by a German distributor for the Berlin International Film Festival.
This selection sparked off an international incident as the Japanese asso-
ciation of Filmmakers (Nihon Eiga Seisakusha Renmei known as Eiren –
not to be confused with Eirin), that represented filmmakers working for
the major studios, made strong objections on the grounds that the film was
an independent ‘pornographic’ film and should not be screened as an
official Japanese entry. At that time, Japanese entries were achieving
some success at the festival as in 1963, Imai Tadashi’s Bushido: Samurai
Saga (Bushidō zankoku monogatari) produced by Tōei Kyoto had won a
prize, and in 1964 Hidari Sachiko won best actress for her roles in both
Imamura’s Insect Woman and Hani Susumu’s She and He (Kanojo to kare
1963). Eiren’s subsequent threat to withdraw from the Festival in future
years over the screening of Secrets behind the Wall was taken within this
context. The festival organizers responded saying that it was impossible to
withdraw the film, but that a compromise could be reached as the film
would be screened by special invitation and not under the category of an
official Japanese entry. Eiren was not satisfied and the Japanese Foreign
Office was brought in. It is clear from the debates of the period that Eiren
was concerned to maintain their legitimacy as the official organization
representing Japanese mainstream filmmakers at a time when the major
studios were entering a period of protracted decline. This coincided with
the rise in the independent sector, in particular a rapid growth in the ‘pink’
film. Wakamatsu Productions were clearly seen as a fringe movement

which needed to be constrained. While Eiren was concerned to protect
their legitimacy as the official voice of the Japanese film industry, the
foreign office was concerned with the image of Japan being presented
to international audiences in Secrets behind the Wall. Having worked so
hard to establish the ‘official version’ throughout the Olympic Games, the
government did not want this undermined by a left-wing director of ‘pink’
films. The Foreign Office, therefore, issued the following statement to
the Festival organizers:
The Film Festival Office has the authority to select and screen films,
however, it is common for hosts of international film festivals to take due
consideration not to offend national feelings or to spread a false image of
a country. . . . (Quoted in the booklet distributed with the DVD version
of Secrets behind the Wall, emphasis mine)
Like Black Snow, Secrets behind the Wall makes complex connections
through sexual ‘deviances’ and male inadequacies between the alienating
effects of the modern urban housing estates (danchi), the high pressure
education system, Hiroshima bomb victims and the Anpo struggles. One
of the more sophisticated of Wakamatsu Kōji’s films, the film opens with
a protracted series of shots of a large urban housing estate. Dwelling on
the uniformity and angular nature of the architecture, the sequence is
interrupted with a close-up shot of an eye. This eye, the eye of a young
rōnin student struggling to pass the university entrance examination, is the
eye of the voyeur through which we observe the comings and goings of
the inhabitants of the housing estate in this erotic/pornographic thriller
version of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). The film therefore plays upon
the transparency of walls and the erotics of a privacy that is not private.
Following these establishing shots, there is a sequence in which two naked
bodies lie together entwined and fragmented as the woman caresses the
keloid scars inflicted on the body of the male at the time of the Hiroshima
bomb while murmuring: ‘You are the symbol of Japan’. Overlaying this
sequence and in the imagination of the woman, are shots of the atomic
bomb explosion followed by images of an Anpo demonstration. In the
background is a huge portrait of Joseph Stalin. These images are both a
hybridization of pornography and politics, and on a diegetic level, they
date this couple as both victims of the war and as activists at the time of the
JCP split in the mid-1950s.
During this period of turbid public debate around questions of

‘obscenity’, Imamura released his film The Pornographers which, as
a pseudo-academic treatise, can be seen as a self-reflexive play on voyeurism,
and perhaps more importantly, a statement on the consequences of the
commoditization of sex in the contemporary age (mid-1960s). While an
ethnographic-docudrama style underpins many of the films directed by
Imamura, at a philosophical level, as Ogawa (1970) suggests, the tensions
between nativist traditions and culture, the countryside and the urban are
framed within discourses attributable to the French philosopher Georges
Bataille. Primarily, Bataille’s point in his treatise Eroticism, derived from
Freud, is that sexuality is constructed from taboos and that the media’s role
in breaking down taboos through the challenges of sexually explicit mate-
rial and pornography is linked to a fading of desire. This, it can be argued,
is the case with the young Jirō of Black Snow. Having been raised in a
brothel where sex is sold and presumably where all is permitted, he is now
impotent. Similarly, with the hero of The Pornographers, Subu (Ozawa
Shōichi 1929–), by the end of the film, due to implied abuse as a child and
his employment as producer and salesman of pornography, is similarly
reduced to impotence.
Satō writing about Ōshima’s 1969 production Dairy of a Shinjuku
Thief (Shinjuku dorobō nikki 1969), which was inspired by Jean Genet’s
The Thief’s Journal, makes a similar comment in relation to the main
character’s inability to establish a satisfying sexual relationship with a girl
while maintaining a sexual predilection for books and more specifically
for stealing them from the famous Kinokuniya bookshop in Shinjuku:
Images of a sexual nature, which flood contemporary society, in reality,

do not mean sexual liberation . . . As a result [of this flood of images],
men are only able to love pin-up-girls and such like; have we not lost the
human contact of living bodies? This irony is evident in the recurring
scenes in the bookshop. The desire this man has for books is consider-
ably high, he gazes at them and fondles them, it is not just the contents
but the binding of each book that exerts a fascination for him. In this way
he seems to be in love with the books. (Satō 1987: 320)
Cinematically, the camera and mise-en-scène fetishize the interactions

between the characters and the books. Suzuki, the shop assistant with
whom the main protagonist attempts a sexual relationship, stays hidden in
the ladies room until the store closes. At which time she emerges and
begins to collect books from the shelves, but not just any books, she
caresses the shelves running her hand along the books in search of specific
texts. Beginning with Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal, on the soundtrack
we hear the voice of Genet reading from the text (this is overlapped with a
Japanese voice-over dubbing). This is followed by Henry Miller reading and
is intercut with a still photograph of the author; then follows Mohammad
Ali, after which several Japanese poets including Tomioka Taeko (1935–)
and Tamura Ryūichi (1923–1998) among others. Someone then reads
from Stalin’s Problems of Leninism and excerpts from the writings of the
Japanese philosopher Kita Ikki (1883–1937). The scene concludes as we
see Suzuki kneeling before this pile of books she has collected in the
middle of the floor as a cacophony of voices reading from multiple texts
crescendos and a telephone ringing bring us back to ‘real’ time of
the film’s mise-en-scène. Satō (1987) argues that the film’s treatment of
books is not unlike that of François Truffaut’s in Fahrenheit 451 (1966).
However, ultimately the main protagonist, the would-be thief, is both
a failure as a lover and a thief. As the owner of the bookstore Tanabe
(played by himself) sees the young thief’s actions for what they are,
mere play; as such, he refuses to recognize him as a thief and does not
call the police.
Bataille argues that it is eroticism that marks the point of distinction
between animal and human sexuality. As he states:
[I]nterminable millenia [sic] correspond with man’s slow shaking-off of

his original animal nature. He emerged from it by working, by under-
standing his own morality and by moving imperceptibly from unashamed
sexuality to sexuality with shame, which gave birth to eroticism. (Bataille
[1957] 2001: 31, emphasis mine)
With culture comes shame accompanied by taboos which destroy sponta-

neous sexuality. What Imamura and later Ōshima espoused in his defence
at the ‘obscenity’ trial against the publication of the screenplay for In the
Realm of the Senses, complete with still photographs from the film, was
that ‘sexual morality’, in the sense understood in contemporary 1960s and
1970s Japan, is linked, as indeed Bataille makes clear and which Ōshima
asserts, to Christian ideals, imported into Japan with industrialization at the
time of Meiji. Alexander goes further, arguing that in the post-war period
again in relation to definitions of what constituted ‘obscenity’, ‘Japanese
officials had tried to emulate as closely as possible European and Ameri-

can standards as part of an effort to re-establish Japanese sovereignty and
make Japan a more acceptable international trading partner with western
industrialized nations’ (Alexander 2003: 155). Therefore, contemporary
Japanese taboos against various forms of ‘sexuality’, and definitions of
‘obscenity’ represent a bastardization of an original indigenous Japanese
erotics.
The conflict between notions of spontaneous ‘animal’ sexuality and
contemporary morality is a dominant theme of The Pornographers. Subu
the ‘master of the erotic’ of the Japanese title sees his job, as a producer
and salesman of pornography, as a social service, as he explains:
Subu: Man’s pleasures are eating and making love. If he can’t do that . . .
Even big executives have no reason to live without that. They work hard
all their lives to get into the best schools and land good jobs. By 50 they’re
old men. They can’t stand up straight [have an erection]. My job is to give
them a purpose in life. In other words it is social welfare.
According to this logic, the contemporary corporate world so distorts

human nature that by 50, salarymen are impotent.
In a later scene at the steam bathhouse Subu and his colleagues in the
pornography business discuss the issue of incest. They had previously
been making a ‘blue’ film for a client during which they discovered that
the man playing the part of the rapist was in fact the biological father of the
female lead, a mentally retarded young girl. Underpinning Subu’s musings
are his own awakening desires for his stepdaughter Keiko.
Subu: Who would ever expect a father and daughter to do that?

Colleague 1: But what else could he do? Holding his daughter is like giving
milk to a baby.
Colleague 2: He said he didn’t consider her to be a woman. It was strictly
fatherly affection.
Subu: But still father and daughter.
Colleague 1: Every father wonders about the man, the one who will get his
daughter first.
Subu: You don’t have to tell me that.
Colleague 1: Every father feels the same way when his daughter reaches that
age. When mine got married, I almost lost my mind.
Colleague 2: Who said you can’t sleep with your daughter? How about
thousands of years ago? They did it with all their relatives.
Subu: That was a long time ago. Not now.
Colleague 1: That’s it, a wild sex party!
Subu: What are you saying? That is what animals do, not human beings.
Colleague 1: We all want to leave the human race.
Colleague 2: We all want to be free. Only society’s taboos prevent us.
Subu: You are misinterpreting democracy.
In the case of Insect Woman, in that Tome becomes a prostitute in

the city before progressing to the status of madam of a brothel, and
The Pornographers because the ‘erotic’ is reduced to commodity form,
sexuality is brought back to the level of the profane to ‘animal’ sexuality.
This marks the distinction between the sexuality depicted in The Profound
Desire of the Gods and The Ballad of Narayama in which sex is a sponta-
neous expression of freedom. As Bataille argues in relation to the orgy of
pre-modern times:
It is a religious effusion first and foremost; it is essentially the disorder of

lost beings who oppose no further resistance to the frantic proliferation of
life. That enormous unleashing of natural forces seems to be divine, so
high does it raise man above the condition to which he has condemned
himself of his own accord. (Bataille [1957] 2001: 113–114)
Work being the condition to which man has condemned himself. In a later
sequence, Subu wanders through a ‘sex party’ which he and a colleague
arranged and to which they charged a fee, only to find himself still in a
state of impotence. He muses:
Subu: Back to the primitive way of life. Orgies are the way to freedom.
Pathetic, pathetic male. Females are motivated by greed. Is anyone alive
here, or what? Behaving like stupefied animals. Tossing and moaning.
You’re alive! Work hard. Start your engines. This is the only thing you can
be sure of . . . until the day you die.
By the end of the film Subu concludes that satisfying sexual contact with
another person is impossible, his accomplice in the pornography trade
prefers masturbation, and so Subu decides that he will build the perfect
female doll. Like the protagonist of Diary of a Shinjuku Thief human
contact in a world that turns all social relations into commodity form
becomes impossible.
Eros and Logos

The relation between time and space that confers absolute priority
to space is in fact a social relationship inherent in society in which
a certain form of rationality governing duration predominates. This
reduces, and can even destroy, temporality. Ideology and science are
merged. (Lefebvre 2003: 73–74)
Adachi Masao, who worked extensively with Ōshima Nagisa and

Wakamatsu Kōji in the 1960s, when interviewed for his memoirs
published in 2003 upon his release from prison after his extradition from
Lebanon to Japan, referring to the ninkyō (chivalrous) films popular in
the 1960s makes the following observations: Japanese mainstream films
eulogize the role of the criminal in Japanese society giving clear expla-
nations as to the motivations for the crimes and the extremes of violence
depicted. However, Adachi continues, in reality this is not the case, ‘I
thought their motivations were not so clear cut and that they acted in the
midst of more turbid situations’ (2003: 224). Another colleague of Ōshima
and Wakamatsu, Matsuda Masao, makes a similar point in an article pub-
lished in Art Theatre in 1972. In this article he considers the differences
between the depiction of ‘terrorists’ in Wakamatsu’s film Ecstasy of the
Angels (Tenshi no kōkotsu 1972) and the glorification of the ‘nihilistic’
heroes of mainstream cinemas’ jidaigeki (period films) and ninkyō films:
The last scene in which the hero kills a large number of people, bestows
on the hero a sense of emotional conclusion because he has been acting
out of personal reasons, that is to say obligation (giri), humanity (ninjō)
or for remuneration (hōshū) . . . In short, the heroes are given reasons to
kill according to melodramatic conventions.
He continues, in the case of films directed by Wakamatsu:
The impulse of the protagonists to kill erupts into murderous action and
the filmmaker does not bestow a reason for this eruption of violence.
Nevertheless, the characters kill without a reason based on their
intuition that they are but a link in the structure of the times. (Matsuda
1972: 25–26, emphasis mine)
As the title of Wakamatsu’s 1969 film Violence without a Cause (Riyū

naki bōkō) implies, the protagonists, a group of three young lads from the
north of Honshū, Aomori, now living aimless lives in the urban landscape
on the peripheries of Tokyo, are not supplied with a reason for their violent
transgressions. Instead their acts of violence erupt at a deeper psychologi-
cal level. Their alienation from mainstream society is reflected in their
singing refrains from the theme song of the Abashiri Prison film series
(Abashiri bangaichi 1965–1973)5 made popular by Takakura Ken (1931–)
in the late 1960s.
Far away, far in the distance beyond the Okhotsk Sea,

A deep red brier rose blooms.
I look at the sea and weep,
This place is called Abashiri bangaichi.
As Yomota (2007) argues, in relation to the violence against women

and the frequency in which gang rape punctuates the films of Wakamatsu,
these misogynistic themes are underpinned by a repressed homosexuality
and function as sites of male bonding. This is obvious in films such as
Violence without a Cause, but also in films such as Sex Jack (Seizoku:
sekkusu jyakku 1970) which, focuses on a group of would-be ‘terrorists’
waiting to hijack a plane. Based on the actual successful hijacking of a
Japan Airlines plane in March 1970 to North Korea by a militant faction of
the Japanese Red Army, the fictitious characters of the film, ostensibly
in hiding from the police, are the second group waiting their turn to
hijack another plane. During this period of waiting they engage in several
bouts of group sex as a means of bonding. In fact, when the working-class
interloper, Suzuki, refuses the offer of sex with one of the girls (a ‘veteran’
who murmurs during intercourse: ‘We will win, we will definitely win/
Katsu no yo! Kanarazu katsu no yo!’), his refusal only adds to the group’s
suspicions of him.
Equally, in films such as Violated Angel (Okasareta hakui 1967) based
on the actual crime of the murder of a group of nurses committed by
Richard Speck in Chicago in 1966 and which Matsuda cites as an exem-
plary film in Wakamatsu’s oeuvre, there is a strong misogynistic theme.
A possible interpretation of the film would lead to the conclusion that, on
one level, the nurses were murdered for their sexual proclivities, while
on another level, there is an implicit critique of the way print media,
pornographic magazines and advertising, have perverted the depiction of
the female form and thus male sexual desire. The film begins with a series
of still images of women, many of which have been fragmented into
provocative poses emphasizing open mouths, buttocks presented to the
camera, extreme close-ups of eyes and feet in stiletto heels, and shots of
underarm hair. The fragmentation and poses photographed are clearly a
fetishization of the female body. These still images are intercut with shots
of the killer, played by the experimental theatre actor of the Shinjuku Red
Tent fame, Kara Jūrō (1940–) who also appears as himself in Ōshima’s
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief. Towards the end of this opening sequence
of still images, there are five images of Kara Jūrō looking at magazines,
thus drawing a direct link between his act of looking and the images. Also
interspersed in this sequence are a few shots of a woman nursing a baby.
The images of the woman with the baby, whose head is resting in her lap,
both jar against the more dominant sexually provocative images of frag-
mented womanhood and also allude to the concluding image of the film in
which Kara Jūrō, curled up in a foetal position, lies naked with his head
resting in the lap of the only nurse to survive the ordeal, surrounded by the
dead bodies of her colleagues.
After the opening sequence of still images we then see the killer, Kara
Jūrō, on a remote beach with a hand gun that he fires into the crashing
waves. Staying firmly within ‘pink’ film conventions of the voyeur, the
film then cuts to a pan down a corridor as the camera looks into the rooms
of the nurses sleeping two to a room. Some are asleep and some are
reading, however, in the last room two of the nurses are engaged in lesbian
sex. The camera then returns to one of the girls who spies on the scene.
She alerts the others who all come to watch. Finally they notice that a
young man, Kara Jūrō, is lurking in the grounds and he is brought in to be
shown the scene. This then becomes the catalyst that turns him into the
killer as the camera cuts briefly from a close-up reaction shot of his face as
he watches the scene to two still shots – one of a crocodile consuming its
prey and the other a repeat shot of the mother nursing the baby with its
head in her lap. Immediately following these two still shots, he storms into
the room breaking through the sliding shōji screen and shoots the two
nurses. It is clear from the structure of this opening sequence that the
nurses are sexually active and provoke the male character. They are then
punished for their precociousness.
In a later sequence, one of the nurses attempts to give herself to her

captor, however, she laughs at a fatal moment as the camera takes Kara
Jūrō’s point-of-view, and the laugh reverberates in his imagination as he
sees five of the nurses naked laughing at him. This sequence depicting
his psychological reaction is drawn out as each of the nurses appears in
individual shots and then in a group shot laughing, at which point he shoots
the nurse who had offered herself to him. It is clear from this sequence
and the earlier one that this character portrayed by Kara Jūrō is impotent
and the gun his phallic substitute.
Adachi Masao, who wrote the original screenplay for the film, explains:
‘In America, because they have developed psychology, it was a time when
the basis of criminal sexual acts were explained through psychoanalysis.
In the case of Japan, in a time before psychoanalysis, problems were
explained variously through an analysis of social problems’ (2003: 197).
It is in this depiction of the inner psychology of the perpetrator that explains
both the innovation and the appeal of these Wakamatsu Kōji’s films. In
Violated Angel, it is the male perpetrator’s point-of-view which is taken
and sympathy is thus shifted from the murdered nurses – the victims –
to the perpetrator who is clearly also a victim of the distortions of sexual
desire created through advertising and the sexual imagery of ‘erotic’
(pornographic) magazines.
Wakamatsu’s later film Running in Madness Dying in Love (Kyōsō
jōshikō 1969) also plays upon psychology and is a variant on the Oedipal
theme as a conservative policeman, in an argument with his young student
activist brother, gets shot inadvertently by his wife as she attempts to inter-
vene in the fracas. The younger brother and the wife of the shot policeman,
on the assumption that he is dead, then run off together. Travelling through
the winter landscapes of northern Japan, their trip is punctuated with
scenes of lovemaking. When they do decide to return to their hometown,
they discover the brother alive and his wife duly returns to him.
At another level, it can be argued that ‘pink’ filmmakers such as
Wakamatsu challenged the use of ‘public welfare’ laws as a way of
determining ‘obscenity’ by linking political themes to representations of
sex. This complicated the situation as it brought into the debate questions
about ‘freedom of political expression’ which is protected under the
post-war constitution. Therefore, when following ‘pink’ conventions in
Sex Jack, the penultimate scene shifts to colour as the protagonists engage
in group sex at which point a semi-naked girl reads aloud to the group
a message from the Japanese Red Army hijackers now living in North
Korea, the intentions of this sex scene becomes blurred. Is it an excuse

for a graphic depiction of sex or a politically charged act of rebellion?
Of the 12 films recently re-released in glossy box DVD sets,6 the
narratives are often constructed around the private lives of political
activists. That is, times spent ‘on the run’ or in hiding from the police,
thereby scenes of sexual activities are peppered with political polemics.
As one astute French critic noted when Sex Jack and Violated Angel were
screened at Cannes in 1971 along with Ōshima’s Ceremonies and
The Tokyo Wars: The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Tōkyō sensō sengo
hiwa 1970):
An advocate of the Japanese leftist movement and of sexual rebellion,

Koji Wakamatsu seems to be rather an opportunist filmmaker, disguised
as a leftist, who basks in pseudo-revolutionary dreams but only when
they stand to turn him a profit. That Nagisa Oshima sees in these films a
disobedience towards authority – and the defence of acts of ‘terrorism
and of individual destruction’ is perhaps to grant too much value to a
filmmaker like Koji Wakamatsu. (Quoted in Sharp 2008: 108)
However, Wakamatsu’s two films Sex Jack and Ecstasy of the Angels
did mirror a shift in political opposition towards terrorism and anarchy.
It was a period of decline and internecine struggles. Both films are about
the disintegration of the collective struggle and the rise of the individual.
It was also at this time that the militant faction of the Communist League,
the Japanese Red Army, was formed and began its military struggle with
the Tokyo and Osaka Wars which form the background to Ōshima’s The
Tokyo Wars: The Man Who Left His Will on Film. In fact, Ecstasy of the
Angels opened at the ATG Shinjuku venue in March 1972 a few weeks
after a Red Army Faction shoot-out with police that took place in February
in the mountains at a lodge called Asama Sansō. As such, Ecstasy of
the Angels was prescient in prefacing the times. As Adachi explains: ‘The
1960 Anpo struggle seemed a tragic struggle to change the country, the
1967–1968 struggle began with a declaration of protest and was more
anarchic, that was the difference’ (2003: 232). In fact three opposition
movements converged at this time: the anti-Vietnam movement intensified
its struggle between 1968 and 1969 in anticipation of Japan’s right to
terminate the US–Japan Joint Security Treaty in 1970: the movement
for the return of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty which abated with the
Sato-Nixon Communiqué of 1969 in which the United States agreed to
return Okinawa to Japan in 1972; and the university struggles (zenkyōtō)

of 1968–1969. During this time, the university system was paralyzed by
strikes and boycotts as students and academics resisted the proposed
increase in tuition fees, sought autonomy for students over student
residences and meeting halls, charged university officials with corruption,
called for greater student participation in the governance of universities,
and the revocation of existing disciplinary procedures. The universities
were eventually brought to heel after the riot police made an assault on
Tokyo University in July and the University Law came into effect in August
1969. The University Law provided sanctions against universities that
failed to maintain order.
Adachi believes that Japan was influenced by Paris in May 1968 and he
links Ōshima’s The Tokyo Wars: The Man Who Left His Will on Film
directly to these events as Ōshima was in France at the time with Death by
Hanging. For filmmakers and writers in Japan, as Adachi states, ‘writers
did not stop with the process of creating a work’ (2003: 229). It was out of
the desire to link creation to the politics of the day that Adachi came up
with his theory of ‘landscape’ (fūkeiron) which both Wakamatsu and
Ōshima incorporated into their films. In their introduction to a published
interview with Adachi, Harootunian and Kohso define ‘landscape theory’
in the following terms:
This theory . . . nimbly equated state power with landscape and, from
1968, in which massive battles and riots erupted between feuding
powers in the streets, launched a more guerrilla-like and nomadic battle
style that would continue post-1968. This sensibility informed Oshima’s
Tokyo sensō sengo hiwa (The Man Who Left His Will on Film, 1970)
and was further radicalized by the photography of Nakahira Takuma.
(Harootunian and Kohso 2008: 67)
However, the most successful adaptations of ‘landscape theory’ in its

purest form is Adachi’s own film Aka: Serial Killer (Ryakushō: renzoku
shasatsu ma 1969) based on the events leading up to the arrest of Nagayama
Norio (1949–1997) who shot four people in 1969. After his arrest and
while in prison he studied Karl Marx’s Capital and wrote a book titled
Tears of Ignorance (Muchi no namida) in which he stressed that his crimes
were a result of his poverty. This book became a best-seller and Nagayama
was granted a stay of execution. Execution was eventually carried out

in 1997.
Matsuda Masao who was involved in the making of the film defines
the theory of landscapes through a discussion of the processes of making
the film. ‘In filming a documentary about Nagayama Norio our first
principle was to find a method which captures the landscape (fūkei) of
the Japanese archipelago’ (quoted in Adachi 2003: 289). He continues,
stating that they traced the same route taken by Nagayama, a migrant
worker during the period of high economic growth who wandered through-
out Japan from rural regions to the cities. By tracing his journey through
space, despite the time frame and the spatial relations being different,
Adachi was able to capture through film an abstraction of the landscape,
and this abstraction, Matsuda states, is the basis of landscape theory. Aka:
Serial Killer thereby separates off the landscape from narrative bringing it
to the fore of action, as Martin Lefebvre (not to be confused with Henri
Lefebvre) points out: ‘Typically, from the perspective of a film’s narrative
or event-based economy – in other words, from the narratological point of
view – exterior space frames the action and is subordinate to it’ (Lefebvre
2006: 24, emphasis in the original). In Aka: Serial Killer the reverse is the
case as the landscape is the primary subject matter of the film. In this way
the power relations that shaped the landscape become visible through the
reproduction of almost identical landscapes. Adachi states, they first vis-
ited Abashiri, a remote part of Hokkaido, where Nagayama was born:
We went to the library and museum searching for data linked to

Nagayama. In this way, while pursuing the spaces in which Nagayama
lived – Abashiri, Tokyo, Yokohama, Tōkaidō, Osaka, Kobe and the holds
of cargo ships – no matter where we went, whatever town we visited we
could not escape the impression that all the towns were the same, this
would not disappear. And from these towns and cities pressing in on us
was a sense of suffocation (ikigurushii), although we stood with bated
breath, the landscape before our eyes was beautiful like that of a picture
postcard. We came to understand that this beauty, because it was like a
picture postcard was the cause of this suffocation . . . I felt that this was
Nagayama’s enemy. (Adachi 2003: 290)
Therefore, as Furuhata points out, the ‘ “enemy of Nagayama” of which

Adachi speaks is not simply the homogenized landscape itself, but rather
the invisible relations of power that produce such homogenized land-

scapes’ (2007: 354).
The very spartan voice-over narration anchors the meaning of the
landscapes filmed in relation to Nagayama’s movements and life as does
the opening and closing intertitle which simply explains the film in the
following terms. ‘Last autumn, in four cities there were four shootings
with the same pistol. This spring, a nineteen-year old youth was arrested.
He was called the devil serial killer’. Diegetic sound is excluded as
discordant jazz music dominates the soundtrack. In a reversal of Henri
Lefebvre’s quotation, which opens this section, space is subordinated to
temporality as match-on-action shots and speeded-up cinematography
reanimate static landscape scenes.
Kōsaiwa Saburō, writing about Wakamatsu’s film Ecstasy of the
Angels which he also links to ‘landscape theory’, argues that the theory
is close to Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of urbanization. He quotes
from Lefebvre:
Today the social (global) nature of productive labor, embodied in

productive forces, is apparent in the social production of space. In the
recent past, there was no other way to conceive of ‘production’ other
than as an object, located somewhere in space: an ordinary object,
a machine, a book, a painting. Today, space as a whole enters into
production as a product, through the buying, selling, and exchange of
parts of space. Not too long ago, a localized, identifiable space, the soil,
still belonged to a sacred entity: the earth. It belonged to the cursed, and
therefore sacred, character, the owner (not of the means of production,
but of the Home), a carryover from feudal times. Today, this ideology
and the corresponding practice are collapsing. Something new is
happening. (Quoted by Kōsaiwa in the booklet accompanying the
DVD. Lefebvre 2003: 155, translated by Robert Bononno)
‘Landscape’ theory documented the ‘something new [that was] happening’.

In other words, in the post-war period, the influence of the State in the
production of social space has gradually been superseded by the impera-
tives of corporate capital. A process which had begun with Japan’s first
wave of modernization after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when the
Imperial Government superseded the Shogunate, which in turn had
transformed the landscape of Edo. In the early post-war period, the
concept of the urban was created around the idea of the danchi urban
apartment blocks that feature as a place of entrapment in Wakamatsu’s
films Secrets behind the Wall and Season of Terror (Gendai kōshokuden
teroru no kisetsu 1969). While now, in recent experimental films, such
as Lunar Child (Runa no kodomo 2009), the decaying danchi is a site of
nostalgia, in the 1980s, the danchi gave way to the ‘mansion’ as corpora-
tions moved away from the ‘cradle to the grave’ employment policy
and ‘my homeism’ became the catch phrase that encouraged people to
purchase their homes through loans. With each phase the landscape alters
as the rural becomes increasingly urban and the urban exudes a sense of
sameness.
In Sex Jack, the river marks the geographical boundary between the
two classes – the rising middle class from which the student activists come
and the working class from which Suzuki, born on the wrong side of the
river, comes. As Matsuda argues, Japanese post-war urban society has
been divided into civil society (shimin shakai) and a lower strata (kasō
shakai). When the lower strata of society resist they are criminalized
through social processes of labelling, a theme taken up by Ōshima in Death
by Hanging.7 In Death by Hanging it is the protagonist’s internalization of
the Japanese-held stereotype of the second-generation Korean living in
Japan that condemns the main protagonist, ‘R’, to criminality. It is this
process of internalization that the film exposes through R’s coming to
consciousness of these socializing forces and his ultimate rejection of the
Japanese State’s juridical authority over his person. Similarly, in Boy
(Shōnen 1969) the focus is on a marginalized family; the father, bearing
the physical and emotional scars of the war, travels the length and breadth
of Japan forcing his wife and son to cause fake traffic accidents and
extorting money from the hapless drivers, threatening to go to the police
unless they pay up. In both the above examples, as with Wakamatsu Kōji’s
film Violated Angel, the inspiration for these films was based on actual
criminal incidents.
Drawing on ‘landscape’ theory as Matsuda points out, ‘Wakamatsu’s
films from the late 1960s and 1970s [during which time he collaborated
with Adachi,] have changed to incorporate these two structural levels of
terrorism’ (1972: 27): that is, the criminality of the ‘lower strata’ and the
revolutionary activities of the student class. As Yomota explains:
In Sex Jack, [Suzuki] stands opposite the leader of the extremist group
and speaks of the deep bitterness of the world of the lower classes who
work in the factories on the other side of the river. With a faint smile
on his lips he speaks of heaven’s punishment (tenchū). However, the
four members of the extremist group cannot understand his real inten-
tions. While indulging in meaningless, abstract conversations about
revolution . . . they busy themselves with sexual intercourse. (Yomota
2007: 23)
In the last scene of Sex Jack, after the student activists have been arrested
and having escaped the police in a shoot-out, the working-class hero walks
defiantly across the river on his way to carry out further acts of ‘terrorism’.
Matsuda argues that the action – his crossing the bridge – is not important,
but rather the landscape he observes as he crosses the bridge is of prime
importance to this scene. The landscape, in this instance the view from the
bridge, reflects the social constructions of power between the two classes
in terms of the gap between growth measured in quantitative terms and
development measured in qualitative terms.
This chapter focused in part on Imamura Shōhei whose films, in stylistic

terms, are often underscored by a naturalist, docu-ethnographic approach.
This was in marked contrast to films made by Ōshima Nagisa and Yoshida
Yoshishige who both tended towards a phenomenologist position and to
focus on our consciousness of objects rather than the objects themselves.
This then fed into a discussion of changing cultural conceptions of
‘obscenity’ in relation to the emergence of the politicized ‘pink’ film in
the mid-1960s such as Black Snow and the films of Wakamatsu Kōji.
However, one must bear in mind that Wakamatsu produced ‘pink’ films in
prodigious numbers and that the films referred to in this study are limited
to those selected by Wakamatsu for recent re-release in glossy DVD boxed
sets. One can therefore assume that these selected films are those that
Wakamatsu himself wishes to be remembered for and my writing of this
chapter has been tempered by this knowledge.
I have argued that in all the examples cited – Imamura, Wakamatsu
and Adachi – there was a desire to overcome the narratives of history being
institutionalized through mainstream cinema in particular, and the media
in general. The arguments about mainstream cinemas’ featuring ‘pink’
films and the Japanese association of filmmakers, Eiren’s, objections to
the selection of Wakamatsu’s film Secrets behind the Wall as an entry into
the Berlin Film Festival attest to the efficacy of these counter-discourses to
unsettle certain elements within both the film industry and the government
who intervened on behalf of Eiren with the organizers of the Berlin
International Film Festival.
This chapter also argued that impotence was a major theme that allego-
rized the barrenness of contemporary consumerist culture. However, if male
sexual impotence is a powerful metaphor for the failures of contemporary
1960s Japanese society in films of Yoshida and Ōshima, in ‘pink’ films
released by Wakamatsu and directed towards male heterosexual desire,
this attack on masculinity through impotence is problematic for male audi-
ence identification. This problematic can only be satisfactorily answered
through the psychologically misogynistic point-of-view taken in the films
which clearly places the blame for male violence perpetrated on women
onto the victims and the society at large. The character portrayed by Kara
Jūrō in Violated Angel is impotent when confronted by real women. He
lives in a fantasy world of sex magazines. In the examples of Sex Jack and
Go Go Second Time Virgin (Yuke yuke nidome no shojo 1969), Yomota
argues that the characters played by Akiyama Michio have been sexually
humiliated in some way – Suzuki in Sex Jack was caught masturbating
and the character in Go Go Second Time Virgin is raped at a sex party, the
character played by Kara Jūrō in Violated Angel is humiliated by the nurses
who catch him lurking in the grounds – this humiliation is the cause of the
murderous outbursts of these characters. I would suggest that the appeal of
these films to male audiences can be explained through the misogynistic
themes of violence which are justified through the psychology of the male
protagonists.
In Wakamatsu’s oeuvre strong social class distinctions are maintained
as protagonists from the student activist class are far from impotent,
in fact, they demonstrate an excess of sexual energy. In the example
of Season of Terror, the hero lives with and has sex with two women
before going off as a human bomb to attack the airport tower at Hanida
in a violent bid to stop the Prime Minister from going to the United
States. However, as Alexander explains, one’s analysis of these ‘pink’
films should be tempered in the light of changes in the international
film industry.
When American filmmaking moved in an explicitly hard-core direction

in the late 1960s . . . Japanese filmmakers did not, could not, follow
because of the strict enforcement of restrictions placed on films shown in
public. Unable to include more explicit sexuality and in fear of losing
market share, Japanese filmmakers at that point began to combine
permissible depictions of sexuality with ever more graphic images of
violence and sadomasochism. (Alexander 2003: 157)
Impotence and the psychological scars inflicted on men from the lower
social order through the commodification of sex in an advanced consumer
culture were major themes in the Wakamatsu films recently re-released in
boxed sets. Thus the depiction of sexuality, the impotence of the working-
class heroes and the overt sexuality of the student radicals, became, with
criminal and terrorist acts, vehicles through which dominant social dis-
courses of post-war recovery were challenged. The gloss of post-war
recovery symbolized through ‘income doubling policies’ and the Olympic
Games is tarnished by characters who, in one way or another, either refuse
to accept the present-day status quo, or alternatively, are in some way
inadequate to participate – Nagayama Norio from Aka: Serial Killer and
‘R’ from Death by Hanging. In these films sexuality also marks the social
divide, as those from the lower classes, who are unable to find satisfying
relations with women resort to violence and rape. Their rebellion is
codified as criminal behaviour and the student classes whose overt
sexuality is meaningless and whose rebellion is codified as terrorism.
In the following chapter, I shall again return to the question of contested
histories, but this time from the perspective of the documentary film.
Documentary and Performance
C HAPTER
HAP TE R
4
If historiography pursues the surface layer of culture, then I am
motivated by the lower level that supports it . . . I force a union between
questions of the lower half of the body and the daily culture of Japan’s
lower class. (Imamura quoted in Matsushita 1964: 7)
It had been almost twenty years since Japan’s defeat, many people
for the first time were becoming aware that this was no longer the post-
war. It was a time when students still embraced the illusion (gensō) that
Japan as a country had reformed (henkaku). At this time, young and
old thought seriously about how people should live. Defeat had been
a setback on a national scale, at this time, Japanese people were again
taking the first tentative steps towards their desires. At this time one man
vanishes. A man, one day, without letting anyone know, vanishes. His
family and fiancée are left behind at a loss. (Shimizu writing on the 1967
film A Man Vanishes 2001: 264)
[A]s the film unfolded and Okuzaki began pursuing the war in the
present progressive form, I realized that what I really wanted to see were
the ripples of disturbance he caused everywhere he went. I wanted issues
such as postwar Japan and our identity as Japanese to emerge from those
ripples. That’s what I wanted to show more than anything else. (Hara
Kazuo 2009: 173, translated by Pat Noonan)
I
n his fiction films, Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006) situates his
characters on the margins of society in an often pre-modern,
pre-Westernized, ‘originary’ social situation (kisō shakai),
which, as the previous chapter has argued, on one level represented an
attempt to overcome history through the disclosure of the operation
of discursively constructed historiography, that is, the history of the
dominant class. As Ogawa states of Imamura’s social configurations
‘it is a society that has no relation to the formation of history nor does it
participate in history’ (Ogawa 1964: 66). However, despite claims to
ethnographic research, the society presented is still a construction, just
as Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) sought to define an authentic Japanese
culture through a study of Japanese myths and traditional storytelling, it is
— 115 —
not, and cannot be, based on a pre-modern facticity. As Hayden White

argues at the theoretical level:
[W]hat the entrance into history of certain cultures implies is that their
relationships to those cultures that remained ‘outside’ of history have
undergone radical transformations, so that what formerly was a process
of relatively autonomous or autochthonous relationships now becomes
a process of progressive interaction and integration between the so-
called historical cultures and those deemed to be nonhistorical. (White
1990: 56)
Despite attempting to acknowledge the ways in which power relations

construct Japanese identities, in these films, in particular, The Profound
Desire of the Gods (Kamigami no fukaki yokubō 1968) and the Ballad
of Narayama (Narayama bushikō 1983), their recourse to ‘originary’ soci-
eties is ultimately a nostalgic and parochial ideal that, while critiquing
contemporary consumerist society, feeds into conservative discourses on
nihonjinron (discussion of Japanese identity) which became increasingly
popular in the 1970s and 1980s. This would also in part explain the exotic
appeal of The Ballad of Narayama to the audience at Cannes in 1983.
While Imamura’s ethnographic films represent the positing of ‘originary’
societies as a method for the overcoming of history as written by the
dominant class, his documentary and documentary-styled films represent
an alternative and an altogether more effective challenge to mainstream
history by narrating a view of the past from the memories of female
characters on the margins of society. These films thereby centre on a
dialectic in which historiography is juxtaposed to the physical embodi-
ment of history through consciousness, often through the memory of
prostitutes. In the fictional film, Insect Woman (Nippon konchūki 1963),
Tome (Hidari Sachiko 1930–2001) rises to become the madam of a brothel.
Madam Onboro from the documentary Post-War History of Japan as Told
by a Bar Hostess (Nippon sengoshi madamu Onboro no seikatsu 1970)
was also the mistress of an establishment at Yokosuka servicing the US
military, and indeed, the former prostitute of the 1975 documentary Kara-
yukisan was prostituted in the service of Japanese commercial imperialism
in the late Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) periods. Imamura
makes the following indicative comments regarding Tome from Insect
Woman, however, these comments are equally applicable to Madam
Onboro. Indeed Insect Woman and Post-War History of Japan as Told by
Documentary and Performance 117
a Bar Hostess are the fictional and the non-fictional sides of the same
argument with the documentary structure of Post-War History authenti-
cating the fictional Tome in Insect Woman:
Tome’s way of life is, I think, typical of the way of life of a Japanese
woman. I look hard at the process by which this woman, who was a
simple country girl, gradually became dissolute and transformed into
a non-human. I want to try to seek out how contemporary Japanese
people’s dispositions were formed. (Imamura 2001: 42)
Similarly, Madam Onboro from A Post-War History comes to personify

the rapacious elements in Japanese society that profited from Japan’s
logistic support for America’s War in Vietnam. The early extradiegetic
insert of cattle being slaughtered at an abattoir in Yoshikura, Madam
Onboro’s childhood home, is interspersed with iconic still photographs
from the Vietnam War. The first of which is a young Vietcong soldier stand-
ing naked from the waist up with his hands tied behind his back being
followed by a soldier with a gun. This is later followed by three still images
of dead Vietcong lined up along a road and in ditches.1 These latter stills are
inserted into sequences of cows being butchered and carcasses carved up.
This sequence operates on two levels: first, it makes the obvious links
between butchering and war, a theme the film returns to in relation to US
atrocities in Vietnam, and secondly, we learn later in the film that Madam
Onboro’s father was a butcher which places her on a low social level, an
outsider, a member of the class of Burakumin, those who deal with death in
its various forms. The Burakumin theme becomes one of the defining themes
of the film. In visual terms, images of the slaughter yard and animal carcasses
punctuate the film at pertinent moments. Also the later film Karayukisan
centres on a member of the Burakumin class, and again the film presents her
life history as being defined by her Burakumin status.
Post-War History alludes to the contradictions which structure Madam
Onboro’s life history in post-war Japan (she was 15-years old in August
1945). As she recounts in the film, her parents, as butchers, made a hand-
some profit out of the black-market trade in meat during the occupation,
thereby rising above the poverty of their class. However, at age 15 a
fortune teller at the local festival (matsuri) predicted she would enter the
world of prostitution (mizushōbai). This, Madam Onboro explains, seemed
inevitable. As her mother says, it is difficult for women from the Burakumin
caste to find husbands outside their class and as Madam Onboro admits,
given the discrimination, she was not good at school thus her career paths
were limited. This early part of the film thereby exposes, at the level of
lived experience, the inability of the new constitution to overcome elements
of deep-seated prejudice within Japanese society. Within the context of
post-war democracy and the new constitution, social discrimination was to
be banned and the equality of all citizens promoted. However, as Upham
argues, the reality in relation to the class of Burakumin was very different.
While the government puts substantial amounts of money into improving
the living conditions in Burakumin neighbourhoods and
[d]espite the constitutional prohibition against state discrimination,

there was no law banning private Buraku discrimination. Aside from
haphazard judicial developments and a few specific provisions in
occupation-era statutes such as the Labor Standards Law, it remained
perfectly legal, for example, for employers to refuse to hire Burakumin
or for universities to reject Buraku applicants. And they did. (Upham
1993: 327)
Imamura would again return to the question of discrimination against

Burakumin in Karayukisan in which he visits several Japanese women
now residing in Malaysia who were, as young girls from poor back-
grounds, tricked into becoming prostitutes in various parts of Asia, the
South Pacific, India and America, a practice common after the Meiji
Restoration of 1868. The term karayukisan literally means ‘one who goes
to China’.2 In this film Imamura opens up the question of Burakumin
discrimination in the contemporary (mid-1970s) age despite the fact that
Kikuyo, his principal interlocutor, does not raise the issue. Upon his return
to Japan, he visits the village near Hiroshima where Kikuyo was born, it
becomes clear that she was of Burakumin descent. From the testimony of
two senior men from the village who remembered Kikuyo and her family,
it is clear that discrimination in marriage is still a major problem for people
of Burakumin descent as they recount the death by suicide, two years
previously, of a young student thwarted in love through the discrimination
of his fiancée’s parents. Through this line of argument the film brings us to
the conclusion that Kikuyo did not return to Japan in large part because of
this discrimination.
Katori argues that it was the post-defeat experiences that were central
to Imamura’s work. He goes on to say that in among the confusion over
values, what occupied most Japanese thoughts at that time was the
question of food and survival. There were severe shortages of food in the
cities and many tens of thousands of people died as a result of starvation.
In an attempt to explain the underlying eroticism in Imamura’s films, he
argues, the links between food and sex become stronger, as he explains,
echoing the philosophies of the nikutai bungaku (literature of the flesh)
adherents: ‘When animals are starving, the instinct of survival of the spe-
cies strengthens the sex drive . . . The post-war baby boom has its origins
in starvation. It seems that somehow the appetite for food and sexual desire
are deeply connected’ (Katori 2004: 98). He continues:
With the collapse of the old order due to defeat, people who were fanati-
cal about the old values, and older people, were bitter, but the reaction of
young people was different. The number of young people, who felt as if
before their eyes dark clouds were being lifted and who felt exhilarated,
were many. (Katori 2004: 98)
As Katori emphasizes the threat of being sent to the front battle lines
or being conscripted into homeland defence units, which were to apply
kamikaze-like tactics, had been lifted. Indeed Imamura, who belonged to
this generation, had been conscripted in 1945 to an anti-tank defence unit.
This generation were given a second chance at life after many had become
resigned to death. However, as Ōshima’s film of 1960, Night and Fog in
Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri), depicts with the defeat of the Anpo struggle,
the elation of this generation changed to despair and disgust. As Katori
argues, the symbolism of the ‘pigs’, in Pigs and Battleships (Buta to
gunkan 1961), is not unrelated to the Anpo conflict of the year before.
In that ‘Today, is an age when people have become pigs, Imamura had
this basic understanding. Since Japanese people stood up from the ruins
of defeat, they have single mindedly sought prosperity through material
things, things, things’ (Katori 2004: 164). He then goes on to say that, in
this context, Imamura’s early films were prescient of the ‘bubble’ economy
and its collapse in the 1990s.
Indeed Katori argues that the Anpo struggle and the Sunagawa conflict
(1955–1957) provided the backdrop to Insect Woman. The Sunagawa
Incident refers to the time, September 1955, when a group of activists
trespassed onto the US military base at Sunagawa. About five thousand
people were involved and one hundred were arrested. The original Tokyo
District Court hearing ruled, in March 1959, in the defendants favour
citing Clause 9 of the Constitution and raising questions of the legality of
US bases on Japanese soil.3 However, the subsequent Supreme Court

hearing overturned this judgement. In the film Insect Woman, Tome has
little interest in these affairs.
Imamura saw Tome as an example of the post-war Japanese people’s

attachment to things. There are an overwhelming number of people who
make up this society and there is a deep interest in these kinds of dark
tales. Without affirming or condemning, this is the true appearance of the
Japanese people. Despite experiencing the tragedy of the War a section
of the Japanese people did not change. (Katori 2004: 173)
At a theoretical level, this chapter will focus on the idea of documen-

tary and performance. Bruzzi, in her study New Documentary, makes a
distinction between the realist aesthetic that stemmed from the British
documentary tradition linked to the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s
(major proponents of which were Lindsey Anderson, Karel Reisz and
Mike Grigsby) and what she terms the ‘performative documentary’.
Within such a realist aesthetic, the role of performance is, paradoxically,

to draw the audience into the reality of the situations being dramatised,
to authenticate the fictionalisation. In contrast to this, the performative
documentary uses performance within a non-fiction context to draw
attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation.
The performative element within the framework of non-fiction is thereby
an alienating, distancing device, not one which actively promotes identi-
fication and a straightforward response to a film’s content. (Bruzzi 2006:
185–186)
This chapter will trace, within Imamura’s oeuvre and beyond in the works of
Hara Kazuo (1945–), a similar trajectory from the ‘realist’ authenticating
aesthetic of Insect Woman through to the reflexive documentary techniques
of the performative in films such as A Man Vanishes (Ningen jōhatsu
1967), The Post-War History of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess and the
series of documentary films made for television between 1971 and 1975 in
which Imamura searches, in various parts of Asia, for former Japanese
soldiers and prostitutes who did not return to Japan after the war.4 This
will lead to a discussion of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Yuki
yukite, shingun 1987) directed by Hara Kazuo. The main protagonist in
The Emperor’s Naked Army, Okuzaki Kenzō (1920–2005), had originally
wanted Imamura to base a film on him after seeing Imamura’s television

series In Search of Un-Repatriated Soldiers. However, Imamura intro-
duced Okuzaki to Hara. The chapter will conclude with a discussion
focused on the authenticating relationship between fiction and documen-
tary through a comparative analysis of Fukasaku Kinji’s (1930–2003)
1972 docu-drama film Under the Flag of the Rising Sun aka Beneath the
Battle Flag (Gunki hatameku moto ni) and the Emperor’s Naked Army
Marches On.
The Reflexive Documentary

The impossibility of a perfect congruence between text and history
stems from the impasse between discourse and referent, between the sig-
nification of things and things signified. Representation serves to bridge
that divide, however imperfectly, self-consciously, or illusionistically.
(Nichols 1991: 143)
Despite making Insect Woman while at the Nikkatsu Studio, Imamura

broke with the commonplace techniques employed by the studio system at
that time and instead utilized a variety of techniques normally associated
with documentary filmmaking: hand-held cameras, natural sound recorded
during filming with hidden microphones and location shooting in a small
village in Yamagata. He explains his motives:
While filming Insect Woman it occurred to me that there was no deter-

mined method by which films are made. However, we are filmmakers
who are educated in a film company and certain methods permeate our
very being. Then, I decided to discard the convenience of filming on a set
and filmed on location. On principle, I also discarded the convenience of
post-production dubbing. This film was shot in real buildings and in real
locations and the sound was recorded at the time with a wireless mike. It
is fine even if the sound is a little poor. The effect of breath picked up on
the wireless mikes is interesting. Of course there are lots of difficulties
not using a set or post-production dubbing. (Imamura 2001: 44)
However, as Katori explains, despite the fact that the equipment at that
time was not as sophisticated as now and therefore surface noise intrudes
into the soundtrack and images are grainy, all this adds to the authenticity
of the film; in Bruzzi’s terms ‘draw[ing] the audience into the reality of
the situations being dramatised to authenticate the fictionalisation’

(2006: 185).
Although Imamura’s independent film, A Man Vanishes, produced
under the auspices of the ATG, is ostensibly a documentary film based on
the search, by his fiancée, for a man who went missing, about half way
through the film the object of investigation (taishō) changes to become an
investigation into the lives of the missing man’s fiancée, Hayakawa Yoshie,
and her relationship with her estranged sister, Sayo. This shift in the object
of the film alters the definition of the film as documentary turning it from
an observational study that would act as a social commentary on the high
number of people who went missing in Japan at that time to a ‘performa-
tive documentary’ in which both the filmmaking process is brought to the
fore while dramatic situations and confrontations between various people
are actively provoked. Therefore, I would suggest that this film, through
the filmmaking process, becomes an early example of ‘reality cinema’
before the surge of interest in ‘reality TV’ in the 1990s. As a process,
Imamura would develop this style of ‘performative documentary’ further
with devastating political effect in Post-War History of Japan as Told by a
Bar Hostess. This film mirrors, at the documentary level, the fictional
world established in Insect Woman. Madam Onboro is the authenticating
‘reality’ that Tome represented and both are metaphors for the post-war
nation.
Referring to the background of A Man Vanishes Imamura states, the
number of people who went missing in 1967 was 80,000 and his original
intention in making the film was as follows:
It was a time when, riding the wave of rapid economic growth, young
people flooded in great numbers from the country into the cities. Many
young people, their dreams shattered, went missing. I wondered where
someone would go who had suddenly disappeared. I started from the ques-
tion, how do rural families and regional communities, that have lost their
young people, alter qualitatively (henshitsu). (Imamura 2004: 134–135)
Indeed one of the opening sequences of the film is of a long shot of a

crowded street as the official from the missing persons bureau muses:
All these people crowding each other. In a small country like this, where
do people who vanish hide? When you think about it, it is really strange
they must just stay concealed in a hole-like place beyond our vision.
It is clear that the thematic change in direction of the film, from a

documentary on missing people to an investigation into Hayakawa,5
exposes the gap between the real and representation. As such, instead
of attempting to conceal this gap, Imamura exposes it by developing it
further. Realizing that Hayakawa, during the filming of the first part of
the film, had made the transition from abandoned fiancée searching for
answers to a performer, he recollects:
What I had wanted to film was simply a person confronting the abscon-
dence of her fiancé. I became frustrated with Hayakawa, who was no
longer concerned and had become an actress. During that time, I realized
that she had lost interest in Ōshima [her fiancé] and had begun to like
Tsuyuguchi Shigeru [the actor] who was accompanying her as they col-
lected material . . . After abandoning the search for Ōshima, I eagerly set
about stripping bare this person called Hayakawa. I wanted to approach the
film through the world of passion (jōnen). If Hayakawa intended to become
an actress, this seemed a suitable way forward. (Imamura 2004: 136)
Thus the film develops as an investigation into Hayakawa and her

relationship with her sister Sayo. At the point when Imamura realizes that
she is performing, he actively manufactures confrontations and sets up
the romance sub-plot. It is at this point that the filmmaking process is
increasingly foregrounded. The staff and Imamura are filmed discussing
the transformation of Hayakawa.
Imamura: What is an actor? It is not yourself. Is that not the case?

Tsuyuguchi: I think it is both.
Staff C: Tsuyuguchi Shigeru is himself a non-fiction.
Tsuyuguchi: Non-fiction but . . .
Imamura: But while being a non-fiction, in this case, part of you is acting.
Tsuyuguchi: However, that is still me.
Imamura: That is the same for Hayakawa.
Staff C: It is the same for Hayakawa. She herself is non-fiction while flirting
with fiction.
A little later they discuss the development of the romance:
Tsuyuguchi: My position is that of guardian. If she has turned her attentions

to me, how can one say it, it is difficult.
Imamura: But this is a completely new reality (genjitsu). I have the feeling
that I want to seize this new reality.
In a later sequence, after one painful interview for Hayakawa in which

an associate of Ōshima’s admits that Ōshima was having doubts about his
impending marriage, the shot cuts to that of Tsuyuguchi and Hayakawa
sitting in the back of a car with the tape recorder between them replaying
the significant lines from the interview. This sequence, foregrounding
the filmmaking process, augments the suspicion that Ōshima was in fact
running away from Hayakawa. The camera then cuts to a shot of the
tape recorder on the car dashboard as Tsuyuguchi’s voice is heard saying:
‘That means he didn’t want to get married.’ The tape recording continues
but the image cuts to an exterior shot of Hayakawa pacing up and down in
the snow. This is one of many examples where image and sound are out of
sync; the soundtrack acting as bridge between images infers how the image
should be understood. It is at moments like this that the film ceases to be
about the search for Ōshima and becomes an investigation into how
Hayakawa will react to certain manufactured situations and the revelation
of unanticipated information. To heighten the dramatic tension, a shaman
is introduced to bring to the surface of the image the subconscious doubts
the two sisters have about their respective involvements with Ōshima, who
by the latter part of the film, is but a catalyst to investigate the psychology
of the two women.
When Hayakawa gave her consent to be in this documentary film
she was an amateur, a woman searching for her fiancé. However, as
Shimizu argues:
When she faces the cameras she is transformed from an amateur

searching for her fiancé into an actress performing her role (yakume).
Furthermore, any amateur when facing a camera or recording equipment
acts to a certain extent. Therefore, it is difficult to distinguish between
amateur and actor. In the case of Hayakawa, it is clear that the screenplay
was already deep within her subconscious and that she induced the staff
in that direction. After all Hayakawa is an actress starring in the leading
role of the documentary film A Man Vanishes. At the same time she is a
secret screenplay writer. Because Imamura Shōhei is a director who
attempts to grasp the totality of people, he thought it would be interesting
to be drawn into Hayakawa’s screenplay. (2001: 284)
Although Shimizu places the emphasis for the change of direction clearly
on Hayakawa, it is also clear that Imamura is the main controlling agent
as, at one point, Imamura films Hayakawa and Tsuyuguchi with a hidden
camera and microphone as she declares her love for the actor. Imamura is
thus actively involved in manufacturing the confrontations and issues
raised by the film in the latter half. However, the fact that, in A Man
Vanishes, the filmmaking process disrupts and intrudes upon the world it
is filming is made manifest in the penultimate scenes when the distance
between the real and representation is thrown wide open in the climax
as Imamura, now a strong presence in the film, orders the set in which
they are sitting dismantled as ‘truth’ is questioned. This act exposes the
documentary, an investigation into the disappearance of Ōshima Tadashi,
as an elaborate fiction.
Yoshie: Director
Imamura: Yes
Yoshie: What is truth (shinjitsu)?
Imamura: (Calling for the stage hands to dismantle the set he says) – The
truth ought to be accompanied by a sense of reality (jikkan). I don’t know
what or where the truth is, but that, I think is in itself a truth. (The camera
pulls back in a crane shot and we see the group sitting around a table in
what had been a room. The walls are being dismantled by the stage hands.
Imamura continues:)
For example, there is this set. There is a ceiling, but no roof, for all
intents and purposes, it feels as if we are sitting in a room and have been
talking up to now. I assume you have all had a sense of the reality of this
room. However, this is only a set in the middle of a stage in the middle of
a film studio. This sense of reality cannot really be trusted.
This is a fiction.
From the fact (jijtsu) of Ōshima’s disappearance this investigative drama
developed, however, this does not mean that it developed naturally. No, it
developed because we made it develop.
(At this point, Imamura calls to the technicians for light. He continues:)
In short, this is all it is. You were filmed by the camera. Tomorrow,
again, here a different film will be made and another fiction drama filmed.
However, lies (uso) will never become truth (hontō). This is what we call
fiction.
In an interview quoted in Shimizu, Imamura is reported as saying the

following regarding this penultimate scene:
At the beginning I hadn’t really thought about how it would end, I just
had a vague idea. However, in the middle it seemed all lies, to this
point we had been pursuing lies. If it was a lie then we should use a set.
By dismantling the set we exposed the actual time and the fact that it was
a studio set and therefore showed it to be a fabrication. (Imamura quoted
in Shimizu 2001: 385)
Shimizu continues arguing that, because of the constructed nature of film

as a form, there is no real distinction between fiction and non-fiction. The
only distinction that is possible is whether there is a pre-written script or
not. In the case of A Man Vanishes, Hayakawa Yoshie and her sister Sayo
both improvise their lines. Therefore, I would suggest that Imamura’s
documentary films can best be described as ‘reflexive documentaries’ in
that he makes his authorship increasingly explicit. As Bruzzi states in
another context: ‘The signposting of the documentary author-director or
his or her overt intrusion crystallises documentary’s fundamental conflict
between subjectivity and objectivity’ (2006: 198). Here Bruzzi is referring
to the work of contemporary Western filmmakers such as Michael Moore
and Nick Broomfield. However, it is clear from the analysis of A Man
Vanishes that Imamura was already confronting this conflict between
‘subjectivity and objectivity’ in the late 1960s as A Man Vanishes parallels
the amassing of the documentary story about the search for Ōshima with
the experience of making the film. This auteur-performer style became the
hallmark of his later series of interactive television documentaries in which
much of the time is taken up with travelling around meeting contacts who
then direct him to other contacts and intermediaries. In fact in the 1975
episode In Search of Un-Repatriated Soldiers – Continued, Imamura fails
to find any non-repatriated soldiers and the 46 minutes of the film are
given over to the search.
While, through the process of filming, Imamura comes to the realiza-
tion that Hayakawa is performing a role in the film A Man Vanishes, in
his next documentary film Post-War History of Japan as Told by a Bar
Hostess, he makes both the role of Madam Onboro as performer explicit in
the opening sequences and exposes the traditional aim of documentary –
to represent the real – as an impossibility. This he does with devastating
effect as he depicts the constructedness of both documentary as a form
and newsreel versions of Japanese post-war history as fiction. This he had
already begun to do in his fictional film Insect Woman. By juxtaposing
significant historical moments with the life course of his main character,
Tome, he creates a dialectical relationship between the event and its
representation.
Post-War History as Told by a Bar Hostess begins with a scene in

which Imamura is shot through a glass window speaking on the telephone
with Akaza Emiko (the former proprietor of the Onboro Bar in Yokosuka)
about her contract for the film. In fact the explicit terms shutsuen keiyaku
(performance contract) and gyara no ken (fee) are used during the course
of the conversation. These opening sequences expose the mechanics of
documentary filmmaking, establishing the fact that Akaza Emiko – Madam
Onboro – is a paid performer. The term gyara refers specifically to a fee
given to entertainers and shutsuen literally translates as performer. It is
clear that Madam Onboro is being employed to make this film. As she
says herself early on in the film when visiting the premises of her former
Yokosuka bar: ‘Various things have happened in the two years since
I closed the bar, but never in my wildest dreams did I think I would make
a film.’
By juxtaposing scenes from newsreel footage of significant his-
torical events in Japan’s post-war history with Madam Onboro’s
recollections of her life, Imamura reverses the ‘voice-of-god’ convention
of the authoritative omniscient male narrator by giving that role
to Madam Onboro whose comments are prompted by both Imamura’s
questioning of her and by the scenes on the newsreel films she is
watching. As Imamura states:
What have these last twenty-five years been for us? Our post-war
history is depicted through the unfolding of a description of an ordi-
nary woman’s survival and transformation from war to the present.
It begins by expressing the post-war history through people’s various
experiences, her grandmother had strong feelings about the Crown
Prince’s wedding and her mother is nostalgic for the black-market.
While following the post-war history of one ordinary family various
issues that involve the family are deconstructed, especially, the rela-
tionship between parents and children in the nuclear family, the
relationship between husbands and wives and the loss of customary
morals. (Imamura 2001: 64)
The voice and the reaction shots of Madam Onboro, thus, dominate
the newsreel images which are reduced to mere prompts. The other point
is that Madam Onboro, as principal commentator, is present watching the
images and she therefore mediates our gaze as we watch her watching
the newsreel footage. As Bruzzi explains: ‘The ostensible purpose of
the “voice of God” model is to absent personality and any notion of

internal monologue, to generalise, to offer an omniscient and detached
judgement, to guide the spectator through events whilst remaining aloof
from them’ (2006: 63). Where the ‘voice-of-god’ narration accompanying
the newsreel footage anchors possible meanings inherent in the images,
Madam Onboro’s presence and the spontaneity of her commentary
opens up the meanings of the images to ambivalence and uncertainty.
She thus disrupts the imposed stability of the masculine ‘voice-of-god’
narration on the newsreel footage. However, it is the use of a woman’s
voice which is perhaps the most recognizably confrontational aspect of
the film. As Bruzzi explains in relation to documentaries filmed in an
expository mode:
The traditional expository mode of direct address relies on the proximity

between text and image: the words explicate the visuals, telling the
spectator how he or she should interpret them; the potential for
secondary, connotative meaning is limited. A crucial component of
such ‘unproblematic’ narration has traditionally been held to be the
masculinity of the ‘voice of God’, the traditional tones of authority and
universality. (2006: 64)
Therefore, the use of a woman’s voice and a woman from a marginalized

group, the Burakumin, is most obviously confrontational as she adopts a
critical and almost mocking tone to many of the events depicted, thus
opening up the potential for ‘secondary connotative meanings’. For
example, when newsreel scenes of the Bloody May Demonstrations of
1952 are being depicted, Madam Onboro recollects: ‘At that time we went
to Tokyo, Gone with the Wind was playing in Shinjuku. We were aware
that there was a demonstration going on in the area, but we weren’t
interested as we really wanted to see the film.’ At another point in the film
when images of the Crown Prince’s wedding are being shown, Madam
Onboro notes that the Crown Prince’s bride’s name is Michiko and that
this is also her sister’s name, written with the same Chinese ideographs
(kanji). She muses: ‘Looking at the two, they have the same name but
there is a great difference, my sister works in a bar and this person is
marrying into the Royal Family.’ It is in the subsequent discussion of
marriage prompted by the newsreel footage that Madam Onboro makes
specific reference, for the first and last time, to her Burakumin status.
She states: ‘It would be like someone from a Burakumin family marrying
into an average Japanese family.’ As Imamura explains, the family or rather

the extended family, the ie system, is central to the film:
I thought I should describe from Madam Onboro’s perspective the

collapse of the Japanese family and its connection with the collapse
of the Emperor system. One can say that the Japanese family (ie) has
collapsed, but the Emperor system is firm as a rock, it is not moving.
With regard to the Japanese family (ie), can we really say that it has
collapsed? (Imamura 2001: 63–64)
While Madam Onboro’s recollections disrupt and destabilize the

historical account of events given in the newsreel documentary footage,
it also becomes apparent through the Vietnam War theme running through
the film that Madam Onboro’s own account of events is open to question.
In particular, when she refuses to accept the ‘reality’ of photographs
depicting American soldiers’ atrocities in Vietnam insisting that American
soldiers are ‘gentlemen’ (shinshi) who are not capable of such cruelty,
her bias becomes obvious. The two themes that the film established in
the early sequence juxtaposing the slaughter house with the stills of the
Vietcong dead and captured – Madam Onboro’s Burakumin status and the
anti-Vietnam War themes – thus coalesce in these latter scenes. Madam
Onboro suffered discrimination as a Burakumin. Unable to form a stable
relationship with a Japanese man, she then began a series of relationships
with foreign men, mainly American. As such she is, from her own experi-
ences, unable to accept the ‘truth’ evidenced through images of American
massacres in Vietnam. Wanting to believe in the American dream, the film
ends with Madam Onboro’s departure for America with her American
sailor husband and their mixed-blood child.
Post-War History, through its documentary format, is the authenticat-
ing reflection of Imamura’s earlier fiction film based on the life of Tome.
Madam Onboro provides the living proof that, despite the hardships
experienced through discrimination, defeat and occupation, such women
exist and thrive in post-war Japan. In both films, the personal narratives
of Tome and Madam Onboro are entwined with the national narrative.
As such, they provide an explanatory paradigm through which to interpret
Japan’s post-war economic recovery. Because both women are prostitutes,
there is an underlying critique of this economic recovery which was based
on Japan’s seemingly subservient role as provider of logistic support to
American military campaigns in Asia. However, while Insect Woman is
fictional, Post-War History is purportedly based on claims of ‘truth’ as a

documentary. While both films draw on newsreel footage and references
to actual events in Japan’s post-war history, the newsreel footage in Insect
Woman works to forward the narrative and to tell us something about
the character of Tome. When she is caught up in a taxi during an Anpo
demonstration she is angry and argues with the taxi driver who advocates
an alternative route. Tome is cross because this will increase the fare.
Earlier in the film, just after a sequence of newsreel footage depicting the
Bloody May Day demonstration of 1952, the scene cuts to Tome counting
out money with a group of women working out their finances. In all these
examples, the film depicts Tome’s increasing obsession with the accumu-
lation of money. Similarly, when Madam Onboro recounts her disinterest
in the same May Demonstration of 1952 as she was going to see Gone
with the Wind, her reactions authenticate, through processes of evidence
and testimony, a section of the Japanese people’s disinterest in politics
and their willingness to be bought off by the promises of consumerism.
In terms of visual style, Madam Onboro’s status as representative within
the film is supported by freeze frames that link newsreel footage to her
commentary on events. As a newsreel segment comes to an end, the cam-
era zooms in on one of the peripheral characters and freezes on their face.
The scene then cuts to a frozen shot of Madam Onboro before moving on.
In this way she is visually linked to a bystander and her role as witness
recounting her experiences is authenticated. As Nichols notes:
Narrative, be it in the form of fictions or historiography, offers con-

solation in the face of indefinite approximations. It offers a morally
textured, ideologically inflected means of accounting for temporal dif-
ference, what we commonly call change. Narratives, like mythologies,
are the discursive systems into which we translate historical contingency
in the hopes of arresting it, at least in our representations, so that facts,
practices, and ideals can be organized into patterns of meaning available
for adoption, contestation, subversion, or overthrow. (1991: 240)
The Past in the Present

Okuzaki was quite aware of the camera’s effect. I wouldn’t say he was
aware of it from the start, but he’s a perceptive person, so I think he soon
realized how a film works and quickly grasped the nature of the medium.
Absorbing this, he used it to his own advantage. As a result, I didn’t have
to tell him how to act; he acted within the framework of the film. (Hara
2009: 165, translated by Pat Noonan)
Fukasaku Kinji’s 1972 film Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, utilizing
a docu-drama format, to paraphrase Nichols, functions as a discursive
system into which we translate historical contingency by drawing the
search for past truths in history into a discernible continuity with the
failures of the anti-Anpo struggles of 1968 and 1969. Taking as its theme
the search for the ‘truth’ regarding rumoured military executions that
took place in New Guinea just after Japan’s defeat on 15 August 1945 and
allegations of cannibalism among starving soldiers abandoned by the army
in New Guinea at this time, the film following a Rashomon-esque structure
of competing individuals’ memories, links the past with the present while
critiquing the war generation’s inabilities to stop Japan’s involvement in
contemporary 1960s and 1970s wars in Asia, namely, the Vietnam War.
Based on a docu-drama format that utilizes an expository editing mode
which ‘organizes cuts within a scene to present the impression of a single,
convincing argument in which we can locate a logic’ (Nichols 1991: 19),
the film, like A Post-War History, uses a woman as a representative of the
normally voiceless majority to provide the narrative logic and continuity
through which we the audience can apprehend the visualized fragments of
memory, documentary footage and still photographs.
Scripted by Shindō Kaneto (1912–), Osada Norio and Fukasaku Kinji,
in stylistic terms, the film is built around a complex structure of documen-
tary footage, still photographs, black and white and colour footage. Con-
structed around the search for the ‘truth’ about her husband’s death in the
last days of the war, Mrs Togashi Sakie (Hidari Sachiko 1930–2001) seeks
out various men who were stationed in New Guinea with her husband.
These men then recount their memories of her husband inflecting these
memories with their own personal concerns and motivations. The private
inner fictional narrative of Mrs Togashi’s search for the ‘truth’ is contained
within the wider discourses of history through the insertion of documen-
tary footage and still photographs that link Mrs Togashi’s search to the
role of the Emperor in the war and his now peacetime role as constitu-
tional monarch officiating at services to commemorate the war dead, only
Mrs Togashi’s husband is not commemorated at these services because
he was reportedly executed for desertion.
The documentary footage and stills provide the authenticating evidence
against which the memories of the various men that Mrs Togashi seeks out
can be measured in terms of the past in the present. The film opens with a
statement taken from the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors to the
effect: ‘Our nation’s military has always served at the discretion of the
Emperor’. The scene then cuts to a series of still shots taken from the war
period of massed troops including a medium close-up shot of the Emperor,
in full military regalia, on horseback reviewing the troops. Then follows a
series of still shots from the war as the title credits are superimposed in
red. After this credits sequence, there is a cut to documentary footage of
the Emperor and his Consort making a speech in commemoration of the
war dead at the twenty-sixth Memorial Service in 1971. The Emperor’s
voice-over states:
Twenty-six years after the war, it still pains our heart to recall the many
who fell in battle, those who lost their lives to the ravages of war, and the
families they left behind. I stand here before the citizens of our nation,
praying for world peace and our national progress, in solemn tribute to
those who perished.
Like the Emanuelle Riva character in Hiroshima mon amour,

Mrs Togashi and the men she encounters are unable to live in the present.
They are unable to forget and get on with their lives. As Mrs Togashi
explains to an official in the Ministry of Welfare:
Until my husband can rest in peace, I’ll have no comfort . . . I don’t come
back year after year because I want military benefits, I’m here because
I want to know the truth – was he really executed for desertion? . . .
It’s been twenty-six years since he died, all the other survivors, attend
the War Memorial Service with the Emperor and offer chrysanthemums.
Why is it only my husband without a shred of evidence . . . (She pauses).
I too would like to join the Emperor and offer a chrysanthemum for my
husband.
It is only the officer – a former major in the army based in New Guinea,
who upon his return evaded charges of war crimes, despite, as the film
makes clear, his having been the officer responsible for the execution of an
American pilot who crash-landed in New Guinea – who is able to find a
place in the new Japan. He was a representative of Japan’s ruling wartime
elite who, after the reverse course policy implemented by the occupation
authorities was reinstated, ironically became a member of the board of the
Southeast Asian Development Corporation. In his conversation with Mrs

Togashi he explains his motivations in supporting the execution of her
husband in terms of Japan’s contemporary 1970s prosperity: ‘We had
to maintain order under any circumstances. Don’t we owe the post-war
recovery and prosperity, our newfound stature among world powers in the
line of battle, entirely to the firm imposition of national order?’
At the other end of the social scale, Mrs Togashi encounters Terajima
Tsuguo (Mitani Noboru 1932–), a former private first class now living on
a rubbish tip on the outskirts of Tokyo running a piggery. He is unable to
live in mainstream society. As he explains, when he first returned to Japan
after the war he was comfortable in the burnt-out ruins of the black market,
but as Japan entered the period of high economic growth he was forced out
of the city and into a Korean shantytown and even this last refuge is under
threat.
Terajima: Tokyo was a vast burnt-out wasteland. People were living among
the ruins. Without shame or inhibition, their naked humanity exposed.
I found that so comforting. Everyone’s just like me. I forgot all about
eating human flesh and betraying my comrades and I felt utterly at peace.
But that didn’t last for long. Order was soon restored.
Intertitle: Military Procurement Boom
Terajima: As the streets, the houses, and how people dressed rapidly
improved, I found myself all alone left behind like an idiot. (The camera
zooms in to shots of skyscrapers and shop windows.) And the terrible
memories of eating flesh and betraying my comrades began to weigh on
my heart day and night. I ran away. The world was after me and I ran away.
I settled into this Korean shantytown. But this place too won’t last a month.
(Panning shots of building construction work encroaching and closing
in around the shantytown.) The kind of place where I feel at home, the
carefree world of the burnt-out ruins no longer exists in Japan.
Ōhashi, the former second lieutenant and high school teacher, offers a
different perspective linking his experiences of returning to Japan to the
chaos of the anti-Anpo struggles and the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Ōhashi: (Spoken above scenes of young people playing tennis and rugby
Ōhashi reflects on the meaning of his generation’s youth). What was the
meaning of our youth? When I began teaching after my repatriation, it was
all I could think about. The meaning of my life and my friends’ lives lost
to the war. (Echoing the Emperor’s commemoration speech with which
the film opens, he continues.) ‘A precious sacrifice that war, essential for
a new and peaceful Japan’. That was the only answer I could find. Young
people know nothing of the war, nothing of its horrors. If I have a right to
teach anyone anything, it is only to convey the misery of war to new
generations.
The camera then zooms into a medium close-up of Mrs Togashi and
Mr Ōhashi standing on the roof of the school as US air force planes come
screeching into land after carrying out bombing raids in Vietnam. Two
very fast stills with the intertitle ‘Bloody May Day’ are inserted into this
sequence before a series of iconic stills of students confronting riot police.
These are then interspersed with an intertitle saying ‘Rearmament’ fol-
lowed by more stills taken at demonstrations. This is followed by another
intertitle saying ‘Patriotism’ which introduces a series of iconic stills
associated with the suicide of Mishima Yukio on 25 November 1970. This
sequence thus brings the historical narrative into the present.
While Imamura’s documentary films foreground the filmmaking pro-
cess to authenticate the ‘truth’ of the logic of the argument they make,
Fukasaku Kinji’s Under the Flag of the Rising Sun draws on documentary
conventions to authenticate the fictional narrative of the film woven around
Mrs Togashi’s search for the ‘truth’ about her husband. In particular, the
film draws on what Nichols calls ‘evidentiary editing’ techniques that
support the logic of the argument rather than ensuring the continuity of
time and space more usually associated with fiction films.
Under the Flag of the Rising Sun depicts suspected historical
atrocities – executions and cannibalism – as a prism through which to
interpret present-day events. On the other hand, The Emperor’s Naked
Army Marches On, utilizing what Hara refers to as an ‘action documen-
tary’ mode, legitimates these claims to ‘truth’ advocated in Under the
Flag of the Rising Sun. While Imamura exposes the inherent gap in
documentary filmmaking between the real and representation head-on
through reflexive strategies foregrounding the filmmaking process, Hara
Kazuo explores some of these same issues in his book Camera Obtrusa:
The Action Documentaries of Hara Kazuo and in his production notes to
The Emperor’s Naked Army, in particular, questions of the authorship of
the film. In these books, Hara sets out how the theme of the film, a further
investigation into acts of cannibalism and the execution of two members
of a platoon some twenty-three days after Japan’s surrender in 1945,
only came to light after the decision was taken to centre a film on
Okuzaki Kenzō. Okuzaki, a repatriated former soldier from the New
Guinea campaign, had come to prominence for shooting, with a slingshot,

pachinko balls (ball bearings) at the Shōwa Emperor outside the Imperial
Palace in 1969. He had also been arrested and questioned by police for
death threats he had made to the former Japanese Prime Minister, Tanaka
Kakuei. Between 1956 and 1966 he had spent ten years in solitary confine-
ment for the manslaughter of a real estate agent. However, in his book
Camera Obtrusa, Hara makes it clear that it was he, and not Okuzaki, who
instigated the idea of investigating the executions after visiting returned
soldiers from the New Guinea campaign. As he states:
Yamada [Kichitarō a former soldier and one of the people Okuzaki

meets] showed me a roster of ex-soldiers, so I looked up their addresses,
located their homes, and paid each of them a visit. During these visits,
I learned about the cannibalism and the execution. I then went to
Okuzaki and told him that I wanted him to visit his fellow former
soldiers. All I said was, ‘Something definitely took place in New Guinea,
but I’m sorry, I’m not going to tell you what it was. It’s very important
for the documentary that we capture your reaction when you learn what
happened for the first time. So I can’t tell you what took place. Please
forgive me. But something undoubtedly did take place. Let’s just go and
see, OK?’ (Hara 2009: 154, translated by Pat Noonan)
Hara continues:
In other words, I was the one who told Okuzaki that something had
happened during the war, even though, in the film, it appears as though
Okuzaki decided to investigate the events by himself.
It was almost as if I already had the basic outline for the screenplay.
I expected the film to depict the process of Okuzaki investigating the
execution, and then I wanted to end up in New Guinea. (Hara 2009: 154,
translated by Pat Noonan)
However, despite Hara’s assertions to the effect above that he instigated

the train of events that make up the plot-line of the film, it is also clear that
Okuzaki, who also published a book The Philosophy of ‘God’s Army’ (Yuki
yukite ‘Shingun’ no shisō) in 1987, utilized the film as part of his didactic
project and to publicize his philosophies. In simple terms, Okuzaki had
reconciled his own safe repatriation to Japan after the war through his
belief that those few who survived were returned to do god’s work in the
prevention of future wars. This he believed would be achieved through
public admissions of atrocities and sufferings undergone by those who
experienced the war. Accountability and not retribution was central to his
argument. Hence, his particular animosity to the Shōwa Emperor, who
evaded all responsibility for the war fought in his name, and continued his
reign after the war no longer as a god (the direct descendent of Amaterasu
Ōmikami), but as a constitutional monarch. Okuzaki’s simplistic belief
was that once people came to know the true horrors of war then they would
renounce the use of force forever. This has been the guiding philosophy
that had underpinned the films made within the war-retro genre of main-
stream cinema since the early 1950s and the release of Imai Tadashi’s
(1912–1992) Memorial to the Lilies (Himeyuri no tō ) in 1953 and has fed
neatly into themes of victimization.
Indeed, in advancing his beliefs, Okuzaki feels perfectly justified in
resorting to violence. In two scenes within the film he resorts to violence
which both raises questions of the ethics of documentary filming and the
ethics of Okuzaki’s philosophy which, taken at its simplest, is based on an
‘ends justifies the means’ approach. For the documentary filmmaker the
question arises in what circumstances should the filmmaker cease filming
and intervene? Indeed during the second incident, in a moment of reflexive
documentary filming, someone turns to the camera and says, ‘You just
film it and do nothing.’ The victim of the assault, Yamada Kichitarō,
confronts Hara who is wielding the camera saying, ‘It’s all your fault.
I helped you before’, at which point Yamada’s wife turns to her husband
and says, ‘Don’t blame them.’ Hara, on the other hand, while fully accept-
ing that he will be criticized for this argues that Okuzaki’s theory of
violence is a form of creating action not dissimilar to that of expository
documentary filming:
That’s the principle of prying someone open. In that sense, Okuzaki’s

method of creating action, his mode of acting, actually resembles our style
of shooting a film. No it doesn’t resemble it; the two are exactly the same.
(Hara 2009: 170, emphasis in the original translated by Pat Noonan)
In this particularly harrowing confrontation with the sole survivor of a

company based in New Guinea, Yamada Kichitarō, Okuzaki clearly states
his philosophical position. As such, it is worth quoting this scene at some
length:
Yamada: After all, we were swept by the tide, misled by military leaders.
That’s why I worry about the world today.
Okuzaki: If you mean it, why not share your experiences? So they won’t
start another war. You saw hell didn’t you?
Yamada: Yes.
Okuzaki: How can you console your buddies without talking about it? You
keep silent for the sake of your family. You think it might harm them.
In this last statement, Okuzaki is clearly criticizing Japanese in the

contemporary age (1980s) who were basking in the fruits of economic
recovery, a recovery, that had been made possible due, in large part, to
Japan’s logistic support of the United States in the Korean and Vietnam
Wars. He accuses Yamada of turning away from the public world of
accountability to the private world of his family. At this point, a friend
of Okuzaki who is playing the part of the brother of one of the men
executed says, ‘If you tell the truth the world will realize the horror of war
and it can prevent it.’
Okuzaki continues:
Okuzaki: It can make the sacrifice meaningful. You can make a difference by
telling the truth. Since you experienced hell, it would mean a lot.
Out of the second and third companies of the thirty-sixth Regiment, you
and I are the only survivors. Out of the first company, six survived.
You saw the agony of hell more than anybody else. I didn’t have to
cannibalize. But the Wewak Garrison had to. They couldn’t survive
otherwise.
I don’t blame them, but I blame those who put us in such a state.
And they have not been punished. The most responsible is the ignorant
Hirohito. But he never apologized.
Since the war, you have dedicated your whole life to your family.
Yamada: I am a father.
Okuzaki: But if you hadn’t returned alive you wouldn’t have had a family.
Yamada: I know.
Okuzaki: Then you must tell the truth. Your experience in invaluable. You are
the sole surviving witness of the company. Yet you lived your life as if you
saw nothing, caring only about your family. I don’t think god approves.
He didn’t send you home to live like those who had not experienced the
agony of war. So he punished you and caused you to suffer for so long.
I killed a man, I didn’t want to kill ten years after the war ended. It was my
punishment. I’d been thinking of my business and living for ten years. God
sent me and you back from New Guinea. I was god’s messenger but I
betrayed his trust. I used to go to brothels, but I stopped after I went to
prison. I didn’t want to kill him and I didn’t want to go to jail, but I ended
up in solitary confinement for ten years. That’s because I was chosen to

return alive from the war, yet I wasted ten years thinking of self-interest
like an ordinary man living shamelessly not realizing my duty. So god
punished me.
Hara describes his filmmaking practice as ‘action documentary’ by

which he means that the filmmaker actively initiates situations. In his
early film Goodbye CP (Sayonara CP 1972) it was the disabled poet
Yokota Hiroshi, in Extreme Private Eros (Kyokushiteki erosu koiuta 1974
1974) it was the radical feminist Takeda Miyuki, and in The Emperor’s
Naked Army it is the political activist Okuzaki Kenzō. Hara continues:
‘Those who are provoked take in my words and filter them through
their bodies, then take action. I believe that to take action with your body
means to see things that you would otherwise not be able to see – and to
see things is better than not to see things’ (Hara 2009: 237, translated by
Pat Noonan).
Commenting on Michael Moore (Roger and Me 1989), Bill Nichols
notes:
When the filmmaker moves to centre stage . . . the risk is that other
characters will fall into the narrative slots reserved for donors, helpers,
and villains. Social actors (people) will be subordinated to the narrative
trajectory of the filmmaker as protagonist. (Nichols 1991: 71)
Even though, from Hara’s testimony in his books to the effect that he
was the driving force behind the film, it is also clear that Okuzaki is the
dominant presence in the body of the film in much the same way that
Michael Moore dominates his films to the exclusion of the people whose
position he is purporting to be defending. The conflict between Okuzaki
and Hara for control of the making of the film is manifest in a reflexive
moment when Okuzaki attacks one of his interlocutors, Seo Yukio. After
the initial assault, various neighbours intervene and get the better of
Okuzaki who turns to the camera telling Hara to stop filming at which
point, Hara asserting his position as filmmaker, continues to roll the
camera. Okuzaki is reported as having made the following comment about
this incident in Hara’s production notes:
I wanted you to stop. In the first place, I am the star of this film. I am the
main character. It is unattractive when the main character is being beaten
and the audience for the film will not be pleased. (Hara 1994: 40)
It is clear that Okuzaki takes on the role of filmmaker as protagonist,

sharing many of the characteristics with Michael Moore, as Hara states:
We did not want to end up making a film about the history of the war.
What we wanted more than anything, was to search for the man Okuzaki
Kenzō . . . Nevertheless, because Okuzaki’s ideas and actions went
frequently against my morals, I became emotional. At Kobayashi’s [Hara’s
producer and partner] suggestion, according to reason I acquiesced. There
was an unpleasant feeling, but I decided to take on the role of understudy
(daiyaku) and filmed the action that Okuzaki selected. (1994: 66)
As such, in The Emperor’s Naked Army peripheral characters are, as

Nichols suggests in relation to Michael Moore’s films, diminished in
significance to supporting roles. In Imamura’s documentary series on
unrepatriated soldiers, the complexities of individual lives are not dimin-
ished. Imamura’s expository, interactive style depends for its efficacy on
the confidence that exists between filmmaker and subject. This is explicit
in the latter part of Karayukisan, as the main subject of the film, Kikuyo,
takes over the interviewer role when they go to meet other women who had
been deceived into the overseas prostitution trade as young girls in the
late Meiji period. Kikuyo begins as interpreter as these women speak in
broken and faltering Japanese, advancing to fully fledged interviewer
as she questions them on their hometown, the circumstances of their
deception/abduction and their subsequent life.
The opening title sequence of Karayukisan and the voice-over narration
spoken by Imamura establishes the personal nature of the documentary as
both expository in that it explores elements of Japan’s past and interactive
as it takes account of, and is sensitive to, the devastating impact these past
events had on the lives of individuals. This style is indicative of the
In Search of Un-Repatriated Soldiers series. As Imamura in voice-over
recollects:
Two years ago, I went to Malaysia and by chance I met two or three old
Japanese women. From the Meiji period through to the Taishō period
they were abducted and used as prostitutes for clients in foreign lands
(ikoku), these old women suffering one hardship upon another survived
and are the so-called karayukisan. I felt I had to, at some point, hear their
stories as their stories are the history of common people from the lowest
social strata which is not written about in legitimate history texts.
He concludes this fragment of voice-over by asserting the central aim of

this film, which also links it with the other films in the series and that is,
that ‘this film is a record of certain karayukisan’. The sense that these
films are about alternative and forgotten histories is central to his docu-
mentary oeuvre. While he maintains that this film is a record of ‘certain
karayukisan’ his voice-over expositions locate the individual stories within
wider historical discourses. Pointing out that at the time of the Russo-
Japanese War (1904–1905), Japanese karayukisan worked in China, the
Philippines, India, Borneo and New Guinea greatly contributing to Japan’s
export economy. Imamura then quotes from Muraoka Iheiji (1867–1942)
a notorious oyabun who specialized in procuring prostitutes for work
abroad. His published biography is one of the principal historical sources
on the activities of karayukisan during this period.
Ex-convicts who worked as kidnappers made the women work hard.

Sending earnings back to Japan, their parents prospered. The government
taxed the parents. The ex-convicts became rich . . . The native country
became wealthy (yutaka ni naru).
Imamura continues emphasizing this economic link when he states that the
Japanese state was ‘siphoning off the profits from these women working
abroad’. This is then affirmed by Kikuyo when she talks about receiving
letters from home in which she is asked for money.
In the penultimate sequence, Kikuyo and Imamura visit a Japanese
graveyard and wander through the headstones. As Kikuyo lays flowers and
incense, the camera cuts into headstones showing the age at death, usually
the early twenties, of former karayukisan. These headstones then give
way to simple unmarked wooden grave-markers indicating those who
could not afford headstones. In this way the film gives a sense of historical
proportion and emphasizes the fact that Kikuyo is but one representative
of a trade that conservative estimates suggest involved more than 100,000
Japanese women.
To follow Nichols’ line of argument the expository nature of the edit-
ing subordinates the images to the narrative of Kikuyo’s life experiences,
in that it ‘maintains a rhetorical continuity more than spatial or temporal
continuity’ (Nichols 1991: 35). Thus, in the opening sequences as Kikuyo
introduces herself on the soundtrack, the camera films around the port
before cutting to a medium close-up of Kikuyo seated beside Imamura
with the sound recordist holding a microphone to the foreground. The
immediate nature of the interview is further highlighted as at one point

someone walks between the camera and the seated group. In this sequence
the sound and images are out of sync, foregrounding the filmmaking
process. In each sequence the images support the dialogue as in the
scene where Kikuyo recounts her experience of being loaded onto the
boat. Thinking she was going to Kobe to work in a hotel, she was in
fact tricked into boarding a boat for Singapore. As she describes this
frightening experience the camera cuts leaving Kikuyo on the soundtrack
to explore the dark and dank labyrinthine passages and rooms below
the deck of a merchant ship before cutting to a series of still images of
Singapore harbour in the Taishō period. Later the camera will follow
Kikuyo and Imamura as they search for the house in which she worked as
a young prostitute. Within all the films that make up the In Search of
Un-Repatriated Soldiers series the expository, interactive mode of filming
ensures a degree of empathy with the films’ subjects while exposing
unrecorded accounts of the historical past.
Abé Mark Nornes argues that a shift occurred in Japanese documentary

filmmaking in the mid-1970s from an observational mode, in which the
distinction between the subject (shutai), the filmmaker and the object
(taishō) being filmed was maintained, to a style of filmmaking in which
this distinction became increasingly blurred.
If we use the shutai/taishō [subject/object] pair to sketch the shape of

this shift, we could say that if the previous generation of documentarists
strove to ‘go with’ or ‘sympathize with’ the taishō, the new generation of
documentarists folded the taishō into the shutai. This is to say, the shutai
became the taishō. (Nornes 2002: 65–66, emphasis in the original)
Nornes is referring in part to the work of the renowned Japanese docu-

mentary filmmaker Ogawa Shinsuke (1935–1992) who made among
other films the influential Sanrizuka Series which, the film historian Satō
Tadao argues, is filmed as a series of notes on the way Japanese peasants
farmed. In this context, the peasants are teaching the filmmakers how to
farm. As such, they are depicted as confident individuals and not as
victims or support actors (Satō 1996 vol. iii: 212).
Ōshima Nagisa (1932–) adopted a similar observational mode of film-
ing in his documentary Forgotten Soldiers (Wasurerareta kōgun) which
was broadcast as part of a television documentary series Non-Fiction
Theatre (Nonfikuikushon Gekijō) on 16 August 1963 to commemorate

18 years since the end of the war. During the Pacific War many Koreans
were drafted into the Japanese military and with defeat they were repatri-
ated to Japan. However, with the signing of the San Francisco Treaty in
1952, they were deprived of their status as Japanese nationals and were
therefore ineligible to receive a military pension. This situation was
particularly serious for returned soldiers who had suffered severe
wounds during their service as they were unemployable and reduced to
begging in the streets. Ōshima’s documentary follows them for a day as
they attempt to petition first the Japanese government then the Korean
Mission.6 Ōshima explains their plight in an article published in the
Asahi Shinbun in 1964:
The response of the Japanese Foreign Ministry and others was that if
the Korea-Japan talks were resolved, Japan would make a lump-sum
reparations payment to Korea, so the veterans should petition their own
government.
The Korean mission said that these people’s wounds were received on
behalf of Japan, so the Korean government had no responsibility for
them; the people should make their demands to the Japanese government.
(Ōshima 1992: 72, translated by Dawn Lawson)
Caught within this dilemma, Ōshima focuses on one veteran, So

Nakuho, who lost an arm and his sight in both eyes in an American naval
bombardment on the Turk Islands where he was working as a labourer
for the Japanese army. In the penultimate scene in which he and his
compatriots’ frustrations with the day’s events spill over into a dispute, So
Nakuho, forgetting the presence of the camera, removes his dark glasses
and from his eyeless face tears trickle down his cheeks. Ōshima holds
the camera on an extreme close-up of this battle-scarred face and captures
the pain of these veterans. In his own words: ‘We made “The Forgotten
Imperial Army” because, above all, we wanted the Japanese people to
experience the condition of these people as their own personal wound’
(Ōshima 1992: 73, translated by Dawn Lawson).
In contrast to this observational and sympathetic mode of filmmaking,
Hara Kazuo is representative of the shift that occurred in Japanese
documentary filmmaking in the mid-1970s. His second film based on
his estranged wife, Extreme Private Eros 1974, is indicative of this trend.
The film opens with a montage of still black and white photographs of
Takeda Miyuki, his estranged wife, himself and their child. These images
are from the family album and are representative of their life together.
Hara’s voice-over explains his motives in making the film:
Hara: I lived with Miyuki for three years. We had a child and many things
happened. When our relationship reached a certain peak, she decided she
wanted her own space. She took our baby and left me. But she still visited
me once a week. So we had some kind of relationship. One day, she told
me she was going to Okinawa. I got really upset and agitated because if
she went to Okinawa, I would not be able to deal with the feelings I still
had for her. I felt I had to do something. So I decided to make a film. The
only way to stay connected with her was to make this film. I rolled the
camera because I wanted to see her.
In terms of visual style, this shift in the relationship between the filmmaker
and his object that occurred in the mid-1970s is marked by a shift from an
observational mode of representation to more expository or interactive
modes of filmmaking.
Many of the films considered in this chapter are structured around the
narrative paradigm of the search for the ‘truth’ of the past. Imamura
searches for people excluded from historiography, Mrs Togashi searches
for the ‘truth’ about her husband’s death in New Guinea at the end of the
war, and Okazaki Kenzō searches for the ‘truth’ about atrocities committed
in New Guinea at the end of the war. These characters, both real and
fictional, are all trapped in the past. Like the Emanuelle Riva character in
Hiroshima mon amour and the three generations of women in The Women
in the Mirror (Kagami no onnatachi 2002; Yoshida Yoshishige 1933–), the
traumas of the past inhabit and infect the present. According to Insect
Woman, Post-War History, Under the Flag of the Rising Sun and Forgotten
Soldiers in the wider historical context, the present (1960s and 1970s)
chaotic post-Anpo Japan, the trauma of war still determines the present.
In the 1980s, Okuzaki Kenzō is representative of a dying generation
who clings to the belief that if people understood the horrors to which his
generation were exposed, then there would be no future wars.
In terms of visual style, the distinction that Bruzzi makes between
the realist film that builds on an aesthetics associated with documentary
filmmaking to draw the audience into the reality of the situations depicted,
and the ‘performative documentary’ that draws on performances within a
non-fiction context to foreground the filmmaking process and thereby
challenge the ‘truth’ of representation underpinned this chapter. As such,

this chapter traced within the films of Imamura, and beyond in those
of Hara, a similar trajectory from the ‘realist’ authenticating aesthetic of
Insect Woman through to the reflexive documentary techniques of the
performative in A Man Vanishes and Post-War History of Japan. I also
argued that, the expository nature of the editing in both the documentary
films and the docu-drama Under the Flag of the Rising Sun maintains a
rhetorical continuity subordinating both spatial and temporal continuity
to the dialogue. Finally I made the point that Post-War History and
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On provide the legitimating docu-
mentary counterparts to Insect Woman and Under the Flag of the Rising
Sun respectively.
REFLECTIONS
Culture saves nothing and nobody, nor does it justify. But it is the prod-
uct of man: he projects himself through it and recognizes himself in it;
this critical mirror alone shows him his image. (Sartre 2000: 157)
If I attempt to recompose with words what my attitude was at the

time, the reader will be no more taken in than I. We know that our lan-
guage is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those bygone
foreign states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it were to
be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make clear that it is meant
to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest for a time gone
by, but a work of art whose pretext-subject is my former life. It will be a
present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa. Let the reader
therefore understand that the facts were what I say they were, but the
interpretation I give them is what I am – now. (Genet [1949] 1975: 58,
translated by Bernard Frechtman, emphasis mine)
Misako: Spy, you are Japanese, don’t you understand who the
enemy of Japan is? Don’t you know that Japan is being betrayed by
America? (Night and Fog in Japan 1960)
I
n the introduction I began with a quotation from Fukasaku
Kinji’s son recounting his father’s reaction to watching the
events of 9/11 unfold on the television screen. From his son’s
account it is clear that Fukasaku’s response was very different to that of
many Westerners who, while identifying with the immediate victims of
the Twin Towers, expressed outrage against the perpetrators. For Fukasaku
Kinji, and I suspect many other people, past and current victims of American
imperial aggression since World War II, their position of identification was
quite the opposite. In Fukasaku Kinji’s son’s account, it is clear that his
father connected the events of 9/11 to his own past experiences of Japan
under occupation in the immediate post-defeat period. It was these
memories that, conjoined with contemporary events, inspired his rework-
ing of the themes in Battle Royale II: Requiem (2003). As I have argued
elsewhere, the dominant theme of Battle Royale II is a valorization of
‘terrorist’ movements who oppose the globalizing forces of American
world hegemony. From the reception the film met at its gala screening in
— 145 —
Tokyo, it is clear that the sentiments expressed in the film were widespread
within the middle-class Japanese audience who gave the film a standing
ovation. However, the enthusiasm of this audience’s response should be
tempered in the knowledge that this was Fukasaku Kinji’s last film and the
gala screening was held after his death. In many ways, as the use of
Mozart’s Requiem during the opening credits of Battle Royale II attests,
this was the finale to Japan’s dying avant-garde filmmakers of the 1960s
and early 1970s. It was also a plea to Japanese ‘youth’ to carry on the
struggles of idealism in an increasingly utilitarian global geopolitical
world order.
The supervening global experiences of World War II, and in many
instances post-war occupation followed by a betrayal of the promises of
democratic freedom and accountability, led to a spontaneous outburst of
nihilistic rebellion in the late 1950s and 1960s in European and Japanese
cinema. In stylistic terms, this rebellion negated the humanism derived
from the impact of Italian neo-realism on world cinema. In Japan, this
change was evident in Nakahira Kō’s Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu 1956),
Ōshima Nagisa’s A Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibō no machi 1959),
Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun zankoku monogatari 1960), The Sun’s Burial
(Taiyō no hakaba 1960), and Yoshida Yoshishige’s Good for Nothing (Bon
à rien/Roku de nashi 1960), Blood Thirsty (Le sang sec/Chi wa kawaite
iru 1960); in France, in François Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows (Le
quatre cents coup 1959), Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (A bout de souffle
1960); in Britain, in Karel Reisz’s adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning (1960); and in Poland, in Andrzej Wajda’s
Canal (Kanal 1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (Popiól i diament 1958),
and Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (Noz w wodzie 1962). However,
while their Western European counterparts continued to focus on ques-
tions of film style and character interiority, in Japan the involvement of
these filmmakers in the student movements, the protests against the Korean
and Vietnam Wars, and in particular, the anti-Anpo struggles gave their
films a narrative edge centred on the political that also emerged in Eastern
Europe in the late 1950s post-Hungary 1956, in Western Europe during the
Vietnam War era, and in the build-up to 1968.
In the Japanese avant-garde, this political commitment manifested in
an existential rejection of the ‘victimization’ theme popular in the main-
stream cinema’s melodramatic genres. In terms of visual style, this resulted
in the rejection of the flashback structure which emphasizes the a priori
limitations that frustrate personal choice. This generic convention of
Reflections 147
beginning in an ‘originary present’ and then merging into a flashback of an

individual’s reminiscences establishes a causal teleological progression
that places an origin for the present in a determinant past as in such
seminal war-retro films as, Until the Day We Meet Again (Mata au hi made
1950) and The Sacrifice of the Human Torpedoes (Ningen gyorai kaiten
1955). The ‘victimization’ theme is thus antithetical to Sartrean philosophy
which emphasizes the autonomy of the individual and was central to the
shutaisei debates of the period.
The early films of the ‘sun tribe’ subculture, in particular, Crazed
Fruit followed by Yoshida (Kijū) Yoshishige’s début production Good for
Nothing and Ōshima Nagisa’s Cruel Story of Youth, marked the beginnings
of an avant-garde challenge to mainstream productions in terms of both
narrative and visual style as these films are founded on a rejection of the
a priorism of the ‘victimization’ theme and the universal point-of-view
inscribed in omniscient narration. Alternatively, these films depict an indi-
vidual’s relationships to the world; a representation, which the spectator is
permitted to compare to his or her own experiential reality. Memory, as
distinct from historical time, is depicted not as divisible ‘scientific time’,
but as a Bergsonian intuitive temporal flow through which we begin to
sense the relevance of the past for the present and the relevance of the pres-
ent for the future in the lives of the characters in, for example, Yoshida’s
Adieu, Summer Light (Saraba natsu no hikari/Adieu, lumière d’été 1968),
Eros + Massacre (Erosu + gyakusatsu 1970), The Women in the Mirror
(Kagami no onnatachi/Femmes en miroir 2002), Okamoto Kihachi’s
Human Bullet (Nikudan 1968), and Ōshima’s Death by Hanging (Kōshikei
1968) and Ceremonies (Gishiki 1971).
Kurosawa Akira, in his seminal film Rashomon 1950, had already
identified a crisis of ‘truth’ by exposing the unreliability of memory as a
testament to past events. As has been suggested throughout this study,
this exposure of inherent contradictions in the collective remembering of
the past, as presented in mainstream cinema, became one of the dominant
themes evident in the works of Japanese avant-garde filmmakers consid-
ered in this study. Ambiguity, repetition, fragmentation and aporia thus
become the vehicles through which the certitudes of genre films are
challenged and the uncertainties of knowledge made visible. In the
films produced under the auspices of the ATG, the filmmakers, Yoshida
Yoshishige, Ōshima Nagisa and Okamoto Kihachi, were concerned with
the consequences of the past and its legacies as they impacted on the post-
war generation. Challenging the seamless interpolation of the individual
into the mega-narratives of the ‘collective memory’ of the mainstream

studios’ generic renditions of a ‘victimization consciousness’, all three
filmmakers bring to the surface of the image the impossibility of securing
an objective singular account of historical events. Thus to paraphrase
Hayden White in another context, these films depicted the individual’s
thoughts about the historical event rather than the event itself. As Alain
Resnais had already demonstrated in Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and
Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad 1961), thoughts
like memories and the terrors of trauma are fragmentary, incomplete,
lingering and subjective.
While in thematic terms, in films directed by Imamura Shōhei, there
are clear similarities with regard to concerns about the socio-political
impact of the traditional Japanese family structure, the ie, on individuals
living in the contemporary age of advanced capitalism, however, in terms
of both narrative and visual style, there is a clear distinction between films
directed by Imamura, and those of Yoshida Yoshishige and Ōshima Nagisa.
This, I have argued, can best be understood in terms of cinematic method-
ology and the philosophical basis that underpin their various styles of
representation. In short, Imamura’s approach is underscored by a ‘naturalist’
viewpoint derived from the study of the natural sciences and ethnography,
in particular the ethnographic instigator of Japanese folklore studies in the
early twentieth-century Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962).
Furthermore, I argue that in public debates about the ‘erotic’ which
erupted around the film Black Snow (Kuroi yuki 1965) and, in the examples
cited from the films of Imamura Shōhei, and Wakamatsu Kōji, there was
a desire to overcome the narratives of history being institutionalized
through mainstream cinema, in particular, and the media in general. The
heated public discourse around mainstream studios cinema chains screening
‘pink’ films and the Japanese association of filmmakers, Eiren’s, objec-
tions to the selection of Wakamatsu’s film Secrets behind the Wall (Kabe
no naka no hiji 1965) as an entry into the Berlin International Film Festival
attest to the efficacy of these counter-discourses to unsettle certain ele-
ments within both the film industry and the government who intervened
on behalf of Eiren with the organizers of the Berlin Film Festival.
In approaching these topics I have avoided the obvious auteur
approach, partly due to intellectual concerns with the theory, but more so
because of its inability to fully explain the production of a distinct body of
films by a diverse group of individuals within an historical moment. What
did become increasingly obvious as I read through Japanese language
Reflections 149
accounts of the 1960s, written not only by film historians and critics, but
perhaps more importantly, by the filmmakers concerned, most of whom
were prodigious writers (Yoshida 2006, 2003, 1971; Ōshima 2004, 1993,
1992, 1978; Imamura 2004, 2001), was that it was a shared generational
consciousness brought about through shared experiences of the devastation
of war, defeat and occupation that encouraged the development of specific
dispositions that then manifest in a specific set of concerns in the diverse
films they produced. While the ATG provided an industrial basis around
which this group converged, these filmmakers looked to Europe for
intellectual stimulus as an alternative to the culture of consumption encour-
aged by the US-led occupation forces. It was the writings of the essayist
Sakaguchi Ango (1906–1955), Jean-Paul Sartre, August Strindberg, Anton
Chekov, the poet Saikaku (1642–1693) and the Japanese historian Hani
Gorō (1901–1983)1 to whom they turned. Therefore, as a theoretical basis
that takes account of artists’ dispositions, I framed the study within Pierre
Bourdieu’s conception of the ‘field of cultural production’ rather than the
more common auteur theory. As Katori Shunsuke, one of the more recent
analysts of Imamura Shōhei’s oeuvre explains:
A characteristic of this generation is a way of looking at things ‘relatively’

(sōtaiteki), that is, they do not believe in anything absolutely. As
children, they were boys and girls of militarism and were educated to
sacrifice one’s life in the service of the country. And after defeat which
was unprecedented, society’s values changed one hundred and eighty
degrees. Yesterday’s ‘militarism’ changed to ‘democracy’, what had
been ‘good’ until yesterday became ‘bad’ and the reverse, what was
‘bad’ changed to ‘good’. (2004: 97)
Thus the holocaustal events of the twentieth century betrayed the

certitudes of the modern world. In terms of representation, it was no longer
possible to merely present the historical event as an event. Kurosawa in
Rashomon recognizes this fact and presents a murder and rape as a series
of representations of thoughts about the event rather than the factual
presentation of the crime itself. Fukasaku Kinji takes this theme further as
Mrs Togashi (Hidari Sachiko 1930–2001) searches for the ‘truth’ about
her husband’s death after Japan’s defeat in the New Guinea campaign
in Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (Gunki wa hatameku moto ni 1972).
During this search, individual’s memories of past atrocities haunt the
present of the characters’ lives. This then is what Husserl in Ideas defines
as a phenomenological approach and it is this, in Japanese films of the

1960s and early 1970s, that underlies, at the level of visual style, the
distinction between the avant-garde and mainstream studio productions
based on historical incidents related to Japan’s 15-year war. Husserl’s
definition rests on the distinction between the ‘natural’ and the phenome-
nological standpoint:
The former is the ordinary everyday viewpoint and the ordinary stance of
the natural sciences, describing things and the states-of-affairs. The latter
is the special viewpoint achieved by the phenomenologist who focuses
not on things but on our consciousness of things. (Mautner 2000: 260)
In terms of Japan’s 15-year war and the occupation, the alternative to

a phenomenological representation of historical events was a form of
cultural inversion, a timeless project of forgetting in myth. In Japanese
mainstream cinema from the mid-1950s, this manifested in a return to
the ‘tragic hero’ paradigm of historiography and the traditional theatre.
The ‘tragic hero’ archetype not only framed suffering within localized
historical precedents, it also facilitated a project of forgetting: ‘Japan’s
conception of the postwar which negates continuity with the past, made it
possible for Japan not to face seriously the aftermath of its own imperialist
violence in the former colonies and occupied territories’ (Iwabuchi 2002: 10).
As White points out, Jameson in another context similarly concludes that
the modernist de-realisation of the event amounts to a rejection of

the historicity of all events and that this is what throws the modernist
sensibility open to on the one hand the attractions of myth . . . [the tragic
hero], or on the other hand the extravagances of melodrama . . . In the
former case, the meaning of otherwise unimaginable events is seen
to reside in their resemblance to timeless archetypal stories . . . In the
latter case, meaning is rendered spectral, seeming to consist solely in
the spatial dispersion of the phenomena that had originally seemed to
have converged only in order to indicate the occurrence of an event.
(White 1996: 26–27)
This then is also linked to generational consciousness as it took Yoshida

Yoshishige 50 years to reach a point where he could make The Women in
the Mirror, a film about the Hiroshima bomb and its impact on the lives of
three generations of women, while Suwa Nobuhiro, a native of Hiroshima
Reflections 151
and director of the film homage to Hiroshima mon amour, H Story (2001),
understands the event in terms of Hiroshima’s reconstruction driven by
a thriving tourist industry. The processes of forgetting and reimagining the
event through the reconstruction of the city as a monument to the event is
the final chapter set in motion by Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour.
The Okada Eiji character as an architect is complicit in these processes of
forgetting and the sterility of the New Hiroshima Hotel is indicative of the
city’s future status.
Yoshida, in his debate with Suwa published in the Japanese journal
Eureka (Yuriika) in 2003, argues that later generations who would attempt
to re-create images of the holocaustal events of the twentieth century,
such as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have no experi-
ential reality of the events from which to construct their representations.
He states:
To reproduce (saigen) that instant the bomb was dropped is something

I cannot excuse. To show spectators that instant the bomb was dropped,
to express it using the word ‘show’ (miseru) is that correct? Is it not an
image which should not be seen? . . . Most of the people who saw that
instant are dead. Many of the films which have been made to date with
the atomic bomb theme reproduce the instant the bomb fell in an attempt
to show. By attempting to show, it is reduced to a spectacle. They flatter
themselves that they are communicating the truth (shinjitsu) but
something shown is limited and reduced to the same level of a film
spectacular. I have a strong feeling that this is inappropriate. How do we
overcome this paradox of the reproduction of the bomb in films based on
this theme? Even in The Women in the Mirror, I used five photographs
taken immediately after the bomb was dropped as a quotation, but surely
we cannot use the word reproduction for these photographs taken
by photographers by chance. (Yoshida quoted in Suwa and Yoshida
2003: 82)
These photographs taken during the pain of the instant, Yoshida argues,
cannot be conflated with the special effects of the films of the 1950s, 1960s
and 1970s or of the computer graphics of the twenty-first century. In fact,
changing technology ensures that reproduced images of the event once
designed to shock become trivialized as spectators’ expectations and
sophistication in understanding the constructedness of images increases.
Relatedly, in Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag in part sets
out to answer the question raised by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas
published in 1937 between the two World Wars, and that is, how can we not
be horrified by images of the atrocities of war, any war? Another genera-
tion and in another geographical context the Japanese veteran of the
New Guinea campaign, Okuzaki Kenzō, devoutly believes that by forcing
veterans to confront the ‘truth’ of the events of the last days of the war in
the remote Wewak Garrison in New Guinea, this will stop subsequent
wars. This didactic aim informs the documentary in which, the now aging,
Okuzaki tracks down and confronts veterans from the New Guinea
campaign in the 1987 film The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On
(Yuki yukite shingun) made by the documentary filmmaker Hara Kazuo
with support from Imamura Shōhei. As Sontag explains, and is evident
from The Emperor’s Naked Army, it is a failure of imagination and
empathy:
Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive
to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage – these, for Woolf, would
be the reactions of a moral monster. And, she is saying, we are not
monsters, . . . Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have
failed to hold this reality in mind. (2003: 7)
This failure of the imagination and of empathy is rooted in binary

national and racial concepts of the ‘other’ which encourages us, when
confronted with images of pain and suffering in war, to ask the question
who is in pain and who is suffering, and who is the cause of that pain
and that suffering. As Sontag says, the caption with the journalist’s
photograph and, I would add, the historical and geographical context of a
film anchor meaning and help us to determine where our sympathies will
lie. Leni Riefenstahl’s films are a good example. Condemned as ‘Hitler’s
filmmaker’ her films, whatever their cinematic merits, are dismissed as
propaganda.
Sontag, writing within the context of the contemporary Palestinian-
Israeli conflict, continues:
For Woolf, as for many antiwar polemicists, war is generic, and the
images she describes are of anonymous, generic victims . . . But the case
against war does not rely on information about who and when and where;
the arbitrariness of the relentless slaughter is evidence enough. To those
who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the
Reflections 153
other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is
killed by whom. (2003: 8–9)
Sontag argues that to the ‘militant identity is everything’. However, I would

argue that it is not only the ‘militant’ but society in general. The headlines
in the British tabloid press at the death of the Shōwa Emperor in 1989, and
the revival of news(real) footage taken in the immediate aftermath of the
war depicting British and Allied prisoners held in Burma by the Japanese,
all clearly illustrate how concepts of the ‘them and us’ still permeate
thought, despite our welcome embrace within the context of consumerism
of Toyota and Sony et al. In the case of China and South Korea, the
ongoing school ‘text book’ controversies still attest to the importance of
who did what to whom. Sontag herself, inadvertently (one supposes) reads
her position as an American into The Emperor’s Naked Army when she
describes the film in the following terms:
[T]he portrait of a ‘deranged’ veteran of the Pacific war, whose life’s

work is denouncing Japanese war crimes from a sound truck he drives
about the country and paying most unwelcome visits to his former
superior officers, demanding that they apologize for crimes, such as the
murder of American prisoners in the Philippines, which they either
ordered or condoned. (2003: 110)
In fact, there is no mention of American prisoners or the Philippines in

the film.
Okuzaki’s simplistic belief in the didactic ability of the image and the
exposure of ‘truth’ fails to fully comprehend our inability to empathize
and imagine across national and racial affiliations; who is doing what to
whom is still vitally important and supersedes generic understandings of
war itself as an atrocity. Therefore, how Japanese war films are understood
by audiences depends on the audience’s viewing position. The criminal-
ization of Japan through the war crimes trials has ensured that Japanese
wartime atrocities have been open to scrutiny in a manner to which Allied
atrocities have never been exposed. This quite naturally has a strong
bearing on how these films are both viewed and understood at home and
abroad. Equally, it has encouraged public processes of self-reflection (jiko
hansei) to a degree that we, as victors, have never been encouraged, and
from which foundation films from Japan’s avant-garde, such as, Ōshima
Nagisa’s two documentaries Forgotten Soldiers (Wasurerareta kōgun

1963), Diary of Yunbogi (Yunbogi no nikki 1965), and his fiction films
A Treatise on Bawdy Songs (Nihon shunkakō 1967), Japanese Summer:
Double Suicide (Muri shinjū Nihon no natsu 1967), Death by Hanging
(1968) and Ceremonies (1971), Fukasaku Kinji’s Under the Flag of the
Rising Sun (1972), Imamura Shōhei’s series In Search of Un-Repatriated
Soldiers (Mikikanhei o otte 1971–1975), and Hara/Okuzaki’s The Emperor’s
Naked Army Marches On, emerged.
In addressing the relationship between film and politics, so central to

the productions of the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde, we have to ask the
question why did the Left collapse after 1969 and how did this impact on
cinema in the latter half of the 1970s? As Dower has argued, there were
many points of convergence between the conservative political forces and
leftist sympathizers, but perhaps more importantly, ‘by 1972 the Left . . .
had lost hold of many of its most evocative peace issues’ (1993: 27). These
issues included the failure of opposition movements in the 1969 Security
Treaty renewal battles, Okinawa was ostensibly returned to Japanese
sovereignty in 1972 (despite the continued use of the islands for American
military bases), and in 1971 Richard Nixon made overtures to the Peoples
Republic of China which resulted in a rapprochement. However, it was
with the armistice in Vietnam in 1973 that, ‘the last great cause that had
provided a modicum of common purpose among the opposition was
removed’ (Dower 1993: 27). Furthermore, in the 1960s, the period of high
economic growth, the pro-American conservative elites gradually gave up
on their policy to revise the constitution and pursued rearmament policies
through less direct routes. As Gordon states: ‘They instead negotiated
social contracts with key potential or actual elements of the opposition’
(1993: 450).
In terms of domestic policy, prosperity in Japan, due in large part to
the logistic support of American forces in the Korean War and later the
Vietnam War as well as Ikeda Hayato’s ‘income doubling’ policy of
November 1960, led to ‘the so-called Iwato boom as investment in plant
and equipment exploded and the consumer revolution went into full
swing’ (Koschmann 1993: 412). The promise of economic prosperity
undermined any critique of capitalism, and relatedly, Japan’s changing
economic relationship with America, as America increasingly became a
debtor country and Japan became an investor, undermined the argument
that Japan was subordinate to the United States. Furthermore, as Dower
Reflections 155
argues, despite violent divisions between the Left and the pro-American
conservative elites, ideologically, the differences were never stable. ‘The
pro-American conservatives nursed many resentments against the United
States, . . . while liberal and leftist “internationalists” were susceptible to
nationalist appeals’ (Dower 1993: 6). As Koschmann summarizes:
The 1960 Anpo movement owed its distinctiveness to several ideological

and social characteristics. First, despite the revolutionary rhetoric of
its Communist and left-wing Socialist elements, the movement was
basically conservative in that it sought ultimately to preserve the ‘post-
war democracy’, protect the constitution, and prevent various forms
of reactionary tampering with the postwar democratic order . . . Second,
the movement drew mass support primarily from three social groups
that were especially antagonistic towards the prewar regime and had
benefited directly from the constitutional order: young people, women,
and urbanites. (1993: 406)
Therefore, by the late 1960s, those who were intent on pursuing a left-
ist agenda were pushed further towards a radical politics which culminated
in the formation of the Japanese Red Army Faction in 1969 and the violent
uprisings known as the Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe wars. Ōshima Nagisa’s
1970 ATG production, Tokyo War: The Man Who Left His Will on Film
(Tōkyō sensō sengo hiwa), made in the aftermath of the 1969 defeat in the
anti-Anpo struggle was prescient of the subsequent disintegration of the
Left in Japan’s political life, while Wakamatsu Kōji’s and Adachi Masao’s
1971 documentary film The Red Army – Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine: Declaration of World War (Akagun – P.F.L.P: sekai sensō
sengen) is indicative of the internationalization of radicals within the
Japanese Red Army Faction.
In this study I have attempted to address the relationship between film
and politics in the volatile period between 1960 and the mid-1970s after
which the decline in the Left was mirrored in a decline in the avant-garde
film movement. While in the latter half of the 1970s and the 1980s Ōshima
Nagisa increasingly turned to European financiers to fund his productions
In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no koriida 1976), Empire of Passion (Ai no
bōrei 1978), Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (Senjō no meriikurisumasu
1983) and Max mon amour (1986), Yoshida Yoshishige turned to television
documentary and opera before returning to filmmaking with his 1986
production The Human Promise (Ningen no yakusoku).
As Jean Genet, whose autobiographical book The Thief’s Journal

inspired Ōshima Nagisa’s Dairy of a Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku dorobō
nikki 1969), so clearly infers in the epithet that opens this chapter, history
is always textual and, as such, tempered by the present. To paraphrase
Genet: Let the reader therefore understand that the facts were what I say
they were, but the interpretation I give them is mediated by the present.
Therefore, in selecting the films for analysis in this study I focused on
filmmakers who over the last ten years or so have seen a resurgence of
interest in their films through their re-release on DVD in often glossy
boxed sets with comprehensive notes. As such, this study reflects how the
Japanese avant-garde of the 1960s and early 1970s is being reappraised
and interpreted within Japan at this historical juncture. There is still another
history to be written about the Japanese avant-garde and this will be based
on filmmakers whose films remain securely within the national archive.
NOTES
Introduction
1. The links between Battle Royale II and Fukasaku’s wartime experiences
are further elaborated on in the book Eiga Kantoku Fukasaku Kinji (2003) under
the heading ‘The Connections between Battle Royale and your war experiences’
(Batoru rowaiaru ni tsunagaru sensō taiken), pp. 17–20.
2. Imamura Shōhei belonged to a group of Japanese writers and intellectuals
known as the ‘Yakeato Yamiichi-ha’ which also included the writer Nosaka
Akiyuki (1930–) who wrote The Pornographers (Erogotoshitachi 1963) which
formed the basis for Imamura’s 1966 film of the same title. Nosaka also wrote The
Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka 1968). In an interview published in the
Japanese journal Chūō Kōron in 1979 after the release of his film Vengeance
is Mine (Fukushū suru wa ware ni ari 1979), Imamura Shōhei used this term,
yamiato, when talking about the main character. Also a recently published book
uses the term in the title Yakeato no seishun (My Youth in the Burnt-Out Ruins) by
Sassa Atsuyuki 2006.
3. It should be noted that the Shōchiku Studios used the term Nouvelle Vague
as a promotional strategy to market the early films of Ōshima Nagisa and Yoshida
Yoshishige. However, neither Ōshima nor Yoshida were happy with this labelling
as their films grew from a spontaneous reaction to the events of the post-war
period and in no way were they an emulation of the French.
4. By focusing on the films of filmmakers connected to the ATG, this study
only covers one aspect of independent filmmaking in the 1960s. Simultaneous
with the rise of ATG were the student film study circles linked to universities,
for example, the influential Nihon University Film Study Club (Nihon Daigaku
Geijitsu Gakubu Eiga Kenkyūkai) known as the Nichidai Eiken.
5. I have borrowed this phrase from the Australian historian Henry Reynolds
who, using it in the context of the history of indigenous race relations in Australia,
clearly demonstrates in his book Why Weren’t We Told? the significance of history
for the present.
6. Opposition to the Imperial Institution is still in evidence with Katzenstein
and Tsujinaka suggesting that ‘more than 60 guerrilla actions and bombing attacks
occurred in the course of the Emperor’s [Heisei] enthronement ceremony in
November 1990’ (1991: 3).
7. Katzenstein and Tsujinaka (1991) in their study of the Japanese security
forces in the 1970s and 1980s argue that after the 1968/1969 Anpo struggle against
the renewal of the US–Japan Joint Security Treaty, Japanese radicals were forced
out of the country moving their bases of operations to the Middle East (Syria and
— 157 —
158 Notes
Lebanon) in the early 1970s. The opposition to the building and later extension of
the international airport at Narita near Tokyo became the major internal focal
point for domestic opposition movements. This struggle, although abated and
largely unreported, continues into the present.
Katzenstein and Tsujinaka, from official police sources, list the major
international terrorist activities attributed to Japanese groups and individuals as
follows: May 1970, Tel Aviv Lod Airport attack; July 1973, Hijacking of a Japan
Airlines plane over Amsterdam; January 1974, blowing up of the Shell oil refinery
and the takeover of the Japanese Embassy in Kuwait; September 1974, the take-
over of the French Embassy in the Hague; August 1975, the takeover of the US
Embassy in Kuala Lumpur; September 1977, the hijacking of a Japan Airline
plane over Bombay; May 1986, the Jakarta Incident – projectiles were launched
from a hotel at both the US and Japanese Embassies also, a car bomb exploded
within the vicinity; June 1987, an attack on the British and US Embassies in
Rome; April 1988, a car bomb exploded near a US Army club in Naples killing
five people and injuring fifteen (Katzenstein and Tsujinaka 1991: 22–23).
8. For a detailed discussion of the role of the benshi/katsuben in early Japanese
cinema see my ‘Mediators of Modernity: “Photo-interpreters” in Japanese Silent
Cinema’ in Oral Traditions: Performance Literature, vol. 20, no. 1, March 2005.
9. The 1988 animation film Akira was originally targeted at a Japanese
adolescent youth market familiar with the manga series, but when screened by the
Institute of Contemporary Art in London it became appropriated by an ‘art house’
audience leading to a legitimation of anime as a worthy subject of interest
supported by scholarly critiques written by academics (Napier 2005; Kinsella
2000).
10. Deleuze’s study traces an historical shift after World War II from a cinema
driven by action predicated on a sensory-motor schematic (‘movement-images’)
to one of ‘optical situations’ where the camera hesitates and observes (‘time-
images’). This attempt to reposition film analysis away from the linguistic, and
therefore an essentially narrative heuristic, to a stylistic analysis of the visual sign
is applauded. However, neither the established classification of cinema into two
broad spheres, Hollywood ‘commercial’ and European/World ‘art house’, nor the
canon of consecrated auteur filmmakers is adequately analysed or questioned.
Chapter 1
1. See Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political
Reading of the Tragic Hero and A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of
Narrative Film. The post-war role of the Special Attack Forces as cultural icons of
defeat and sacrifice – the ultimate ‘tragic heroes’ – first established in the 1950s
continues to this day with the release in September 2006 of The Sea with No Exit
(Deguchi no nai umi).
2. Popular films such as Imai Tadashi’s Until the Day We Meet Again (Mata
au hi made) 1950 and the trilogy What is Your Name? (Kimi no na wa) directed by
Notes 159
Ōba Hideo (1910–1997) and released between 1953 and 1954, negotiated the
criteria for the reintroduction of ‘romance’ into post-war Japanese cinema.
3. Yoshida Yoshishige mentions that in the immediate post-defeat period
books were difficult to come by, but that he had access to the complete works of
the novelist Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) and a translation of Sartre’s
Nausea which became his principal reading matter during these difficult years.
4. Yoshida goes on to say that he wrote his graduation dissertation on Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness. He expounds further on this link back to Sartre in
an article published in Art Theatre in March 1970 after the release of Eros +
Massacre. In this article he confirms that he read Nausea in high school and that
is what motivated him to take up French studies at university.
5. These sentiments were confirmed by Yoshida in another article published
in the journal Scenario (Shinario) in November 1960.
6. Not only did Sartre’s novel Nausea make it onto the top ten best-seller list
in 1946 (Dower 1999: 190), but his short story ‘Intimate’ appeared in translation
as ‘Mizuirasu’ in the October 1946 issue of the journal World Literature (Sekai
Bungaku) which ‘quickly sold out its print run of 180,000 copies’ (Slaymaker
2002: 94). His complete works to 1951 were translated into Japanese by Shirai
Kōji and published. Slaymaker, in his chapter ‘Sartre’s Fiction in Postwar Japan’,
argues that, ‘The physical that Sakaguchi Ango found in Sartre’s fiction is a
celebration of the individual . . . The individual in an antagonistic stance against
the “ethics” of society, its rules and regulations, is consistent in Ango’s writings’
(2002: 98).
7. In 1993 Yoshida made a documentary for NHK to commemorate the nine-
tieth anniversary of Ozu Yasujirō’s (1903–1963) birth. At the time Yoshida was
60-years old, the same age as Ozu when he died. The documentary begins with the
same recollections as the subsequent book and thematically the film and the book
are related in that they represent a reappraisal of Ozu’s oeuvre.
8. In the introduction to Sartre’s essay ‘Existentialism and Humanism’, Philip
Mairet discusses the relationship between phenomenology and perception through
the example of a black Maltese cross on a white background. How we interpret
this image is dependent on whether we recognize the cross or focus on the white
background which forms the four petals of a flower. He continues:
Perception depends upon this pre-existent element of choice, which determines
the form in which we perceive not only all the varieties of geometrical figures but
every phenomenon of which we become aware. What is perceived is not the
reflection of something objective which the mind duplicates within itself; it is the
result of that something and of the mind’s percipient activity; and this again is
a function of some tension or tendency towards a certain goal. (Mairet in the
Introduction to Sartre 1980: 13)
9. As Sartre explains in The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a

Phenomenological Description:
I feel pity for Peter and I come to his aid. For my consciousness, one thing exists
alone at that moment: Peter-having-to-be-aided. This quality of ‘having-to-be-aided’
160 Notes
is to be found in Peter. It acts on me like a force. Aristotle had already said as

much: it is the desirable that moves the desirer. At this level, desire is given to
consciousness as centrifugal . . . and impersonal (there is no me: I am faced with
the pain of Peter in the same way I am faced with the colour of this inkwell.
([1937] 2004: 18, translated by Andrew Brown)
10. Yoshida made a similar statement in 1969:

[F]or the last ten years, this has persistently concerned me, it is my hope that
while making films I will not possess them. I want to reverse the relationship
between the filmmaker and the spectator that is based on the formula, watching
equals being shown something. (Yoshida 1969a: 58)
11. Onuma (1993), in his book on the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and war respon-
sibility, argues that the trial raised the question of the individual’s moral responsi-
bility of ‘conscientious refusal’ versus the individual’s social duty to follow the
directions of his or her government representatives. This question in its relation to
mainstream cinema is taken up in greater detail both in Myth and Masculinity in
the Japanese Cinema and A New History of Japanese Cinema.
12. Ōshima (1993) rejects the term dialectic (benshyōhō), which he defines as
‘the collision of two different opinions’ (futatsu no kotonaru iken ga butsukaru), to
describe the structure of the film. However, Burch’s use of the term is linked to a
dialectic struggle between the individual and the institution.
13. The three-part, nine-hour-30-minute epic Human Condition/Ningen no jōken
(1959–1961) directed by Kobayashi Masaki and based on the six-volume best-
selling novel of the same title by Gomikawa Junpei (1916–1995) is perhaps one of
the greatest cinematic representations of the individual versus the institution. Other
less heroic examples include I Want to be Reborn a Shellfish/Watashi was kai ni
naritai first filmed in the 1950s and remade in 1994 starring Tokoro Jōji.
14. Asanuma Inejirō was a Socialist politician who in 1959 denounced US
imperialism as the principal threat to Japan and China. In 1960 he was stabbed by
a Right-wing fanatic at a political rally. His death was a very public event being
caught by TV cameras filming the rally.
15. Dower remarks that Kishi Nobusuke was
a brilliant technocrat who had been a leading economic planner in the puppet
state Manchukuo in the 1930s, a vice minister of munitions under Prime Minister
Tōjō Hideki in 1943–44, and an inmate of Sugamo Prison from late 1945 to
1948, accused of class A war crimes but never brought to trail. (1993: 15)
16. As Havens points out:

In 1952 the peak year, 63 percent of all Japanese exports were taken by the
[Korean] war. Even after the cease-fire in 1953, payments by the United States in
connection with its bases and personnel in Japan averaged nearly $600 million
for the rest of the decade, and they still accounted for about 14 percent of Japan’s
exports as late as 1958–1959. Starting in 1965 the United States suddenly began
to place orders with Japan and many other nations for supplies to support its
Notes 161
intervention in Vietnam. By then the Japanese economy was six times bigger
than in the early fifties, so that the trade generated by the Vietnam War was pro-
portionately much less important than the exports stimulated by the Korean con-
flict. Still, the extra military business during 1965–1973 earned profits for a
diverse mix of Japanese firms and their workers, no matter how often Beheiren
denounced them as perpetrators of war on the Vietnamese. (Havens 1987: 93)
17. My understanding of the centrality of trauma to themes of Hiroshima mon

amour is indebted to Michael S. Roth’s essay ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour: You Must
Remember This’ in Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New
Past, ed. Robert A. Rosenstone (1995).
Chapter 2
1. See Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political
Reading of the Tragic Hero.
2. Jameson (1984: 22–23) illustrates this point with the following musings by
Roquentin from Nausea:
This is what I have been thinking: for the most common-place event to become
an adventure, you must – and this is all that is necessary – start recounting it. This
is what fools people: a man is always the teller of tales, he lives surrounded by
his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him
through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.
But you have to choose: to live or to recount. For example, when I was in
Hamburg, with that Erna girl whom I didn’t trust and who was afraid of me, I led
a peculiar life. But I was inside it, I didn’t think about it. And then one evening, in
a little cafè at St Pauli, she left me to go to the lavatory. I was left on my own, there
was a gramophone playing Blue Skies. I started telling myself what had happened
since I had landed. I said to myself: ‘On the third evening, as I was coming into
the dance hall called the Blue Grotto, I noticed a tall woman who was half-seas
over. And that woman is the one I am waiting for at this moment, listening to Blue
Skies, and who is going to come back and sit down on my right and put her arms
around my neck.’ Then I had a violent feeling that I was having an adventure. But
Erna came back, she sat down beside me, she put her arms around my neck, and
I hated her without knowing why. I understand now: it was because I had to begin
living again that the impression of having an adventure had just vanished. (Sartre
[1938] 2000: 61, translated by Robert Baldick, emphasis mine)
3. In 1932, Amakasu Masahiko (1891–1945) became head of the Manchurian

Motion Picture Association (Man’ei) after Japan had founded the colony of
Manchuko in the same year. He committed suicide at the studios upon hearing
of Japan’s defeat in 1945.
4. For a more complete analysis of Human Bullet see Isolde Standish Myth
and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading of the
Tragic Hero.
162 Notes
5. For a more complete analysis of Death by Hanging see Isolde Standish A

New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film.
6. (Extract from the screenplay of Eros + Massacre published in Art Theatre,
vol. 75, May 1970, my translation.)
Wada: (Reading from a book). On the 19 September, I glanced over the back fence as
Ōsugi and Noe were about to leave. At that moment Mako, who had come to our
house to play, seeing them leaving, flew out in a fluster, but soon returned saying,
‘it was my mother and father’. That was the last time we saw Ōsugi. The next day,
and the following day too, Mako came to our house to play.
Once, Mako as always, had come to our house and a newspaper journalist came
and took Mako’s photograph. The day after Ōsugi’s violent death had been made
public, that day too, I thought Mako will come and I warned my children that even
if she comes, they must not say anything about her father so as not to hurt her. The
children, with a fearful expression on their faces, silently nodded. Shortly, as
expected and as usual, Mako came in through the back gate. As soon as she saw us
she said, ‘my mother and father are dead. I went with my uncles to see them and
we came back in a car’. Sensible Mako accepted everything. Mako, who was
unable to understand things sufficiently well, was just a seven-year-old child.
While aware of the pitiable fate of her father and mother, she played innocently as
always. My child, who was the same age, looked sad as they played.
(Wada stops and looking at the spine of the book cover, reads the author’s name
and book title.) Uchida, The Last Days of Ōsugi Sakae: Peoples’ Recollections.
(He continues.) What is this that you have discovered on the gloomy stacks in
the library? The past? History? Records? Dust or culture? For me I reject this, stop
this digging up of yesterday, the whats and whys, because you will never under-
stand anything. (Wada throws the book away.)
Chapter 3
1.
For reasons of internal development and defence against perceived external pres-
sures the government required docile and well-disciplined peasants, workers,
soldiers and sailors: to achieve that end, it was best not to instill in the hearts and
minds of the populace liberal bourgeois values, but rather those samurai virtues
of loyalty and obedience. (Lehmann 1982: 159)
As part of this process the Civil Codes of 1898 and 1912 redefined the family
of the lower classes along the lines of the ‘ie’ which had under the Tokugawa
hegemony (1600–1868) been confined to the samurai class.
2. See Peter N. Dale (1990), The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness, London:
Routledge.
3. The May Day Incident of 1952: when protesters attempted to demonstrate
against the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the US–Japan Security Treaty in front
Notes 163
of the Imperial Palace, they were forced back by riot police. In the ensuing melee
two civilians died and two thousand people were injured. One thousand two
hundred and thirty-two people were arrested.
4. The Civil Code of 1898 established the ie (household system) system,
under which a register was compiled for each family unit and the family head
(koshu) was held responsible for their welfare (Alan Campbell and David Noble,
eds, (1993), Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia, Tokyo: Kodansha, 570).
5. For a detailed analysis of Takakura Ken and the Abashiri Prison films see
my Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema: Towards a Political Reading
of the Tragic Hero and A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of
Narrative Film.
6. During 2005 and 2006, 12 selected films of Wakamatsu Kōji were re-released
in glossy boxed DVD sets complete with interviews and accompanying booklets.
First it should be borne in mind that Wakamatsu as a ‘pink’ filmmaker made several
hundred films and these selected films for re-release are only a fraction of his total
output. Secondly, it should be borne in mind that Wakamatsu himself had control
over the selection of these films and is therefore to a certain extent in control of how
his legacy will be interpreted by fans, critics and academics alike.
7. I have not included a detailed analysis of Death by Hanging or Boy in this
chapter as I have covered both films in some detail in my earlier study A New
History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film.
Chapter 4
1. The screenplay clearly states that these are images of Vietcong.
2. A conservative estimate calculates that 100,000 women were involved in
the trade. Campbell and Noble, Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia, 747–748.
3. See Ienaga Saburo, Japan’s Past Japan’s Future: One Historian’s Odyssey
(2001), 166.
4. In Search of Un-Repatriated Soldiers – the Malaya Episode/Mikikanhei o
otte – Maree hen 1971; In Search of Un-Repatriated Soldiers – Thai Edition/
Mikikanhei o otte – Tai hen 1971; Lawless Matsu Visits Home/Muhō Matsu kokyō
ni kaeru 1973; and In Search of Un-Repatriated Soldiers – Continued/Zoku –
mikikanhei o otte 1975.
5. Throughout the screenplay Imamura refers to Hayakawa Yoshie by her
assigned nickname of Nezumi which literally translates as mouse or rat. For clar-
ity I have translated these references using her name Hayakawa.
6. This film was made before the normalization of relations between Japan
and Korea in 1965. Therefore, when the film was made there was no Korean
Embassy in Japan.
Reflections
1. Hani Gorō is the father of the filmmaker Hani Susumu (1928–).
FILMOGRAPHY
Abashiri Prison (Abashiri bangaichi/網走番外地) series, 1965–1973 – Tōei.

Adieu Summer Light (Adieu, lumière d’été/Saraba natsu no hihari/さらば夏の
光), 1968. Director: Yoshida Yoshishige – Gendai Eigasha.
Ah, Etajima (Aa Etajima/ああ江田島), 1959. Director: Murayama Mitsuo –
Daiei.
Ah, the Hayabusa Army Squadron (Aa rikugun Hayabusa sentōtai/ああ陸軍隼戦
闘隊), 1969. Director: Murayama Mituo – Daiei.
Ah, the Zerosen Fighter Plane (Aa zerosen/ああ零戦), 1965. Director: Murayama
Mitsuo – Daiei.
Aka: Serial Killer (Ryakushō: renzoku shasatsu ma/略称連続射殺魔), 1969.
Director: Adachi Masao.
Akira (アキラ), 1988. Director: Ōtomo Katsuhiro – Akira Seisaku Iinkai.
Ashes and Diamonds (Popiól i diament), 1958. Director: Andrzej Wajda –
KADR.
Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikō/楢山節考), 1983. Director: Imamura

Shōhei – Tōei and Imamura Productions.
Battle Royale II Requiem (バトル・ロワイアルⅡ・レクイエム), 2003. Direc-
tor: Fukasaku Kinji – Fukasakugumi, Terebi Asahi, Wowow, Gag Communi-
cations, Nihon Shupan Hanbai, Tokyo FM, Sega and Toei Video.
The Beauty and the Sorrow (Utsukushisa to kanashimi to/美しさと哀しみと),
1965. Director: Shinoda Masahiro – Shōchiku.
Ben Hur, 1959. Director: William Wyler.
Beyond the Clouds (Kumo nagaruru hateni/雲ながるる果てに), 1953. Director:
Ieki Miyoji.
Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette), 1948. Director: Vittorio De Sica – Italy.
Black Rain (Kuroi ame/黒い雨), 1989. Director: Imamura Shōhei – Imamura
Productions.
Black Snow (Kuroi yuki/黒い雪), 1965. Director: Takechi Tetsuji – Daisan
Productions.
Blood Thirsty (Chi wa kawaite iru/Le sang sec/血は渇いている), 1960. Director:
Yoshida Yoshishige – Shōchiku Ōfuna.
Breathless (A bout de souffle), 1960. Director: Jean-Luc Godard.
Bushido: Samurai Saga (Bushidō zankoku monogatari/武士道残酷物語), 1963.
Director: Imai Tadashi – Tōei Kyoto.
— 165 —
166 Filmography
Canal (Kanal), 1956. Director: Andrzej Wajda.

Ceremonies (Gishiki/儀式), 1971. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Sōzōsha and Art
Theatre Guild.
Children of the Bomb aka Children of the Atomic Bomb (Genbaku no ko/原爆の
子), 1952. Director: Shindō Kaneto – Kindai Eiga Kyōkai.
Coup d’État (Kaigenrei/戒厳令), 1973. Director: Yoshida Yoshishige – Gendai
Eigasha.
Crazed Fruit aka Affair at Kamakura/This Scorching Sea/Juvenile Passion
(Kurutta kajitsu/狂った果実), 1956. Director: Nakahira Kō – Nikkatsu
Cruel Story of Youth aka Cruel Tales of Youth (Seishun zankoku monogatari/青春
残酷物語), 1960. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Shōchiku.
Daydream (Hakujitsumu/白日夢), 1964. Director: Takechi Testuji.

Death by Hanging (Kōshikei/絞死刑), 1968. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Sōzōsha
and Art Theatre Guild.
Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu gurentai/独立愚連隊), 1959. Director: Okamoto
Kihachi – Tōhō.
Desperado Outpost West (Dokuritsu gurentai nishi e/独立愚連隊西へ), 1960.
Director: Okamoto Kihachi – Tōhō.
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku dorobō nikki/新宿泥棒日記), 1969. Director:
Ōshima Nagisa – Sōzōsha.
Diary of Yunbogi (Yunbogi no nikki/ユンボギの日記), 1965. Director: Ōshima
Nagisa – Sōzōsha.
Dream of the Red Chamber (Kōkeimu/紅閨夢), 1964. Director: Takechi
Testuji.
Dry Wind (Karakkaze yarō/からっ風野郎), 1960. Director: Masumura Yasuzō –
Daiei Kyoto.
Ecstasy of the Angels (Tenshi no kōkotsu/天使の恍惚), 1972. Director:

Wakamatsu Kōji – Wakamatsu Productions and Art Theatre Guild.
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Yuki yukite shingun/ゆきゆきて神軍),
1987. Director: Hara Kazuo – Shissō Productions.
Empire of Passion (Ai no bōrei/愛の亡霊), 1978. Director: Ōshima Nagisa –
Anatole Dauman Argos Films Paris and Ōshima Productions.
Eros + Massacre (Erosu + gyakusatsu/エロス＋虐殺), the long version, 1969
(216 minutes), and the short version (165 minutes), 1970. Director: Yoshida
Yoshishige – Gendai Eigasha.
Escape from Japan (Ėvasion du Japon/Nihon dasshutsu/日本脱出), 1964.
Director: Yoshida Yoshishige – Shōchiku Ōfuna.
Extreme Private Eros (Kyokushiteki erosu: koiuta 1974/極私的エロス・恋歌
1974), 1974. Director: Hara Kazuo – Shissō Productions.
Fahrenheit 451, 1966. Director: François Truffaut France.

Flame of Feeling (Honō to onna/Flamme et femme/炎と女), 1967. Director:
Yoshida Yoshishige – Gendai Eigasha.
Filmography 167
Forgotten Soldiers (Wasurerareta kōgun/忘れられた皇軍), 1963. Director:

Ōshima Nagisa – Nihon TV.
The Four-Hundred Blows (Le quatre cents coup), 1959. Director: François
Truffaut.
Go Go Second Time Virgin (Yuki yukite nidome no shojo/ゆきゆきて二度目の処

女), 1969. Director: Wakamatsu Kōji – Wakamatsu Productions.
Goodbye CP (Sayōnara CP/さようならCP) 1972 Director: Hara Kazuo – Shissō
Productions.
Good for Nothing (Bon à rien/Roku de nashi/ろくでなし), 1960. Director:
Yoshida Yoshishige – Shōchiku.
Harp of Burma (Biruma no tategoto/ビルマの竪琴), two versions made: black

and white 1956 (Nikkatsu) and colour 1985 (Fuji Television, Hakuhōdo and
Kinema Tokyo). Both versions were directed by Ichikawa Kon.
Hiroshima mon amour (released in Japan as A Twenty-Four Hour Romance/Nijūyō
jikan no jōji), 1959. Director: Alain Resnais – Argos Films, Como Films, Pathè
Overseas (Paris) and Daiei.
H Story, 2001. Director: Suwa Nobuhiro.
Human (Ningen/人間), 1962. Director: Shindō Kaneto – Kindai Eiga Kyōkai.
Human Bullet (Nikudan/肉弾), 1968. Director: Okamoto Kihachi – Art Theatre
Guild and Nikudan o tsukuru kai.
The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken/人間の條件) in six parts, 1959–1961.
Director: Kobayashi Masaki – Shōchiku.
The Human Promise (Ningen no yakusoku/人間の約束), 1986. Director: Yoshida
Yoshishige – Seibu Saison Group, Kinema Tokyo and TV Asahi.
The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi jigokuhen/初恋地獄篇), 1968. Director: Hani

Susumu – Hani Productions and Art Theatre Guild.
In Search of Un-Repatriated Soldiers (Mikikanhei o otte/未帰還兵を追って)
series, 1971–1975. Director: Imamura Shōhei.
Insect Woman (Nippon konchūki/にっぽん昆虫記), 1963. Director: Imamura
Shōhei – Nikkatsu.
Intentions of Murder (Akai satsui/赤い殺意), 1964. Director: Imamura Shōhei –
Nikkatsu.
In the Realm of the Senses aka Empire of the Senses (Ai no koriida/愛のコリー
ダ), 1976. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Anatole Dauman Argos Films Paris,
Ōshima Productions and Tōhō Tōwa.
I Want to be Reborn a Shellfish (Watashi wa kai ni naritai/私は貝になりたい),
1959. Director: Hashimoto Jun – Tōhō.
Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (Muri shinjū Nihon no natsu/無理心中日本

の夏), 1967. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Sōzōsha.
A Japanese Tragedy (Nihon no higeki/日本の悲劇), 1953. Director: Kinoshita
Keisuke – Shōchiku, Ōfuna.
168 Filmography
Karayukisan (からゆきさん), 1973. Director: Imamura Shōhei.

Killer (Hitokiri/人斬り), 1969. Director: Gosha Hideo – Fuji Television and
Katsu Productions.
Knife in the Water (Noz w wodzie), 1962. Director: Roman Polanski.
Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad), 1961. Director: Alain

Resnais – Argos Films, France.
Listen to the Roar of the Ocean (Kike, wadatsumi no koe aka Nihon senbotsu
gakusei no shuki kike, wadatsumi no koe/日本戦歿学生の手記きけ、わだ
つみの声), 1950. Director: Sekigawa Hideo – Tōyoko Eiga. Remade in
1995.
Lunar Child (Runa no kodomo/ルナの子供), 2009. Director: Suzuki Akihiro –
Tanaka Keiko.
A Man Vanishes (Ningen jōhatsu/人間蒸発), 1967. Director: Imamura Shōhei –

Imamura Productions and Art Theatre Guild.
Max mon amour, 1986. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Serge Silberman Greenwhich
Film Productions and A2 Paris.
Memorial to the Lilies (Himeyuri no tō/ひめゆりの塔). 1953 and 1982. Both
directed by Imai Tadashi. The 1995 version was directed by Kōyama Seijirō.
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (Senjō no meriikurisumasu/戦場のメリークリ
スマス), 1983. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Jeremy Thomas Cineventure
London and Ōshima Productions.
Mother Joan of the Angels (Matka Joanna od aniolow), 1961. Director: Jerzy
Kawalerowicz – Poland.
My Second Brother (Nianchan/にあんちゃん), 1959. Director: Imamura Shōhei
– Nikkatsu.
Naked Island (Hadaka no shima/裸の島), 1960. Director: Shindō Kaneto – Kindai

Eiga Kyōkai.
Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), 1955. Director: Alain Resnais – France.
Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri/日本の夜と霧), 1960. Director:
Ōshima Nagisa – Shōchiku, Ōfuna.
No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kuinashi/わが青春に悔なし), 1946.
Director: Kurosawa Akira – Tōhō.
The Pacific War and the International Tribunal (Daitōa sensō to kokusai saiban/
大東亜戦争と国際裁判), 1959. Director: Komori Kiyoshi – Shin Tōhō.
Paisà, 1946. Director: Roberto Rossellini – Italy.
Patriotism (Yūkoku/憂国), 1966. Director: Mishima Yukio – Art Theatre Guild.
Pigs and Battleships (Buta to gunkan/豚と軍艦), 1961. Director: Imamura Shōhei
– Nikkatsu.
Pilgrim in the Snow (Amours dans la neige/Juhyō no yoromeki/樹氷のよろめ
き), 1968. Director: Yoshida Yoshishige – Gendai Eigasha.
Pleasures of the Flesh (Etsuraku/悦楽), 1965. Director: Ōshima Nagisa –
Sōzōsha.
Filmography 169
Pornographers (Erogotoshitachi yori jinruigaku nyūmon/「エロ事師たち」よ

り人類学入門), 1966. Director: Imamura Shōhei – Imamura Productions.
Post-War History of Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess (Nippon sengoshi madamu
Onboro no seikatsu/にっぽん戦後史マダムおんぼろの生活), 1970.
Director: Imamura Shōhei – Nihon Eiga Shinsha.
Profound Desire of the Gods aka Kuragejima: Tales from a Southern Island
(Kamigami no fukaki yokubō/神々の深き欲望), 1968. Director: Imamura
Shōhei – Imamura Productions.
Purgatory Heroica (Purgatoire eroica/Rengoku eroika/煉獄エロイカ), 1970.
Director: Yoshida Yoshishige – Gendai Eigasha and Art Theatre Guild.
Rancho Notorious 1952 Director: Fritz Lang USA.

Rashomon (Rashōmon/羅生門), 1950. Director: Kurosawa Akira – Daiei Kyoto.
Rear Window 1954 Director: Alfred Hitchock USA.
Red Army PFLP: Declaration of World War (Akagun – P.F.L.P sekai sensō
sengen/赤軍 – P.F.L.P世界战争宣言), 1971. Directors Wakamatsu Kōji and
Adachi Masao – Wakamatsu Production.
Remnants of Chivalry in the Shōwa Era (Shōwa zankyōden/昭和残侠伝) series,
1965–1972. Tōei.
Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta), 1945. Director: Roberto Rossellini – Italy.
Running in Madness Dying in Love (Kyōsō jōshikō/狂走情死考), 1969. Director:
Wakamatsu Kōji – Wakamatsu Productions.
Sacrifice of the Human Torpedoes (Ningen gyorai kaiten/人間魚雷回転), 1955.

Director: Matsubayashi Shue – Shin Tōhō.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960. Director: Karel Reisz.
Season of Terror (Gendai kōshokuden teroru no kisetsu/現代好色伝テロルの季
節), 1969. Director: Wakamatsu Kōji – Wakamatsu Productions.
Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu/太陽の季節), 1956. Director: Furukawa
Takumi – Nikkatsu.
The Sea with No Exit (Deguchi no nai umi/出口のない海), 2006. Director:
Sasabu Akira.
Secrets behind the Wall (Kabe no naka no hiji/壁の中の秘事), 1965. Director:
Sex Jack (Seizoku sekkusu jyakku/性賊セックスジャック), 1970. Director:
She and He (Kanojo to kare/彼女と彼), 1963. Director: Hani Susumu.
Shoeshine (Sciuscia), 1946. Vittorio De Sica – Italy.
Snow Country (Yuki guni/雪国), 1965. Director: Ōba Hideo – Shōchiku.
The Sorrow and the Pity (Le chagrin et la pitié), 1969. Director: Marcel Ophuls –
France.
A Story Written in Water aka Forbidden Love (Mizu de kakareta monogatari/
Histoire écrite par l’eau/水で書かれた物語), 1965. Director: Yoshida
Yoshishige – Gendai Eigasha.
Sun’s Burial (Taiyō no hakaba/太陽の墓場), 1960. Director: Ōshima Nagisa –
Shōchiku, Ōfuna.
170 Filmography
Tales of Japanese Chivalry (Nihon kyōkakuden/日本侠客伝) series, 1964–1971.

Tōei.
The Three Resurrected Drunkards (Kaette kita yopparai/帰って来たヨッパラ
イ), 1968. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Sōzōsha.
The Tokyo Wars: The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Tōkyō sensō sengo hiwa/東
京战争後秘話), 1970. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Sōzōsha.
Town of Love and Hope (Ai to kibō no machi/愛と希望の町), 1959. Director:
Ōshima Nagisa – Shōchiku.
Treatise on Bawdy Songs (Nihon shunkakō/日本春歌考), 1967. Director: Ōshima
Nagisa – Sōzōsha and Shōchiku.
Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (Gunki wa hatameku moto ni/軍旗はためく下
に), 1972. Director: Fukasaku Kinji – Tōhō.
United 93, 2006. Director: Paul Greengrass.
Until the Day We Meet Again aka Till We Meet Again (Mata au hi made/また逢う
日まで), 1950. Director: Imai Tadashi – Tōhō.
Vengeance Is Mine (Fukushū suru wa ware ni ari/復讐するは我にあり), 1979.

Director: Imamura Shōhei – Shōchiku and Imamura Productions.
Violated Angel (Okasareta hakui/犯された白衣), 1967. Director: Wakamatsu
Kōji – Wakamatsu Productions.
Violence at Noon aka Daylight Demon (Hakuchū no tōrima/白昼の通り魔),
1966. Director: Ōshima Nagisa – Sōzōsha.
Violence without a Cause (Riyū naki bōkō/理由なき暴行), 1969. Director:
What is Your Name? (Kimi no na wa/君の名は) in three parts, 1953–1954.

Director: Ōba Hideo – Shōchiku, Ōfuna
Woman of the Dunes (Suna no onna/砂の女), 1964. Director: Teshigahara
Hiroshi – Teshigahara Productions.
The Women in the Mirror (Femmes en miroir/Kagami no onnatachi/鏡の女たち),
2002. Director: Yoshida Yoshishige – Gurūvu Corporation, Gendai Eigasha,
Rūto Pictures and Gurūvu Kinema Tokyo.
World Trade Centre, 2006. Director: Oliver Stone – USA.
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APPENDIX:
HISTORICAL CHRONOLOGY1
1945, August 15 End of the Pacific War

1946, January 1 Shōwa Emperor’s Declaration of Humanity
1946, February Formation of the Japan Young Communist Alliance
which is allied to the Japan Communist Party
(JCP)
1947, January Tokyo University agrees to the formation of
Student Self-Governing Associations (jichikai),
other universities across the country follow suit
1947, February 1 Supreme Command for the Allied Powers (SCAP)
bans the general strike
1948, September 18 Zengakuren forms (All Japan Federation of
Students Self-Governing Associations/Zen Nihon
Gakusei Jichikai Sōrengō)
1949 Commission for the Administration of the Motion
Picture Code of Ethics known as Eirin (Eirin Kanri
Iinkai) forms as a self-regulatory body to enforce
the Motion Pictures Ethics Code
1949 The Dodge Plan – economic austerity measures are
put into effect
1949, September Soviet Union announces that it has the atomic bomb
1950 Until the Day We Meet Again (Imai Tadashi) opens
1950, January The International Communist Information Bureau
(Cominform) accuses JCP leadership of being
guilty of a doctrine which says that it is possible for
the working class to move to socialism and to take
the reins of power in a peaceful way
1950 May Day Incident when 1,232 demonstrators are
arrested
1950, June 25 Outbreak of the Korean War
1950, June–October Zengakuren calls for a nationwide strike and the
boycotting of examinations in protest against the
dismissal of known Communist academic staff
1
Film entries are highlighted in bold.
— 177 —
178 Appendix: Historical Chronology
1950, July PM Yoshida Shigeru addresses the Diet and the Red
Purge begins with over 20,000 suspected Commu-
nist sympathizers losing their jobs
1950, July Rearmament of Japan begins with the formation of
the National Police Reserve
1951, September 8 Signing in San Francisco of the US–Japan Security
Treaty (Anpo-Nichibei Ansen Hoshō) and the Peace
Treaty
1952, January After criticisms from Cominform, the JCP splits
and Zengakuren follows JCP hard line
1952, April 28 Formal restoration of sovereignty to Japan and the
US–Japan Joint Security Treaty comes into force
1952, May 1 May Day Incident: demonstrators attempt to dem-
onstrate in front of the Imperial Palace but are
forced back by riot police resulting in two deaths,
2,000 injuries and 1,232 arrests
1952, July 21 The Subversive Activities Prevention Law (Habōhō/
Hakai Katsudō Bōshihō) is promulgated – widely
seen as the reimplementation of the pre-war 1925
and 1929 Peace Preservation Laws
1952–1953 The Uchinada Incident: mass protests take place
against the construction of a USArmy firing range
1952 National Police Reserve reorganized as the National
Safety Force (Hoantai)
1953 Memorial to the Lilies (Imai Tadashi) opens
1953, July 27 Panmunjom – Armistice is signed ending the
Korean War
1953 Television first broadcast
1954, March 1 Lucky Dragon Incident: a Japanese fishing boat is
contaminated by atomic fall-out at Bikini Athol
1954, March 8 United States–Japan Mutual Defence Assistance
Agreement is signed
1953, November Vice President Richard Nixon urges Japanese
rearmament
1954 National Safety Force (Hoantai) expands to become
the Self Defence Forces (Jieitai)
1954, November Godzilla makes his debut
1955 Japan is admitted to the General Agreement of
Trade and Tariffs
1955 Reconciliation between two Socialist Factions to
present a united front in the 1956 election (the
factions split in 1951 over whether to support the
San Francisco settlement)
1955, September Sunagawa base struggle begins: opposition to the
extension of a runway
1955, September Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen

Bombs (Gensuibaku Kinshi Nihon Kyōgikai known
as Gensuikyō) forms
1955, November Liberal Democratic Party forms
1956 Season of the Sun (Furukawa Takumi) opens
1956 Crazed Fruit (Nakahira Kō) opens
1956, February Khruchev publicly denounces Stalin
1956, May 24 Anti-prostitution Law (Baishun Bōshihō) comes
into effect
1956 Ninth National Congress of Zengakuren – issues
under discussion: the abolition of nuclear weapons,
closing of US military bases, and opposition to
rearmament and militarism
1956 Publication of the novel by Ishihara Shintarō
Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu)
1956 Economic White Paper is published announcing
‘the end of the post-war period’
1957 The Motion Picture Code Committee known as
Eirin is reorganized to include representatives from
outside the film industry, thus successfully avoid-
ing direct government regulation
1958, December Radical wing of Zengakuren separates from the
JCP and forms the Bund group (Communist League/
Kyōsanshugi Dōmei) and takes over leadership of
Zengakuren
1959 Desperado Outpost (Okamoto Kihachi) opens
1959, March People’s Council to Prevent the Security Treaty
Revision (Anpo Jōyaku Kaitei Shōshi Kokumin
Kaigi) forms, is organized by the Japan Socialist
Party, the Communist Party and the General
Council of Trade Unions of Japan, and a further
134 other groups
1959, April 10 Crown Prince’s wedding
1959, April 26 80,000 strong Peoples’ Council demonstration in
front of the Diet building
1959, April A U-2 American spy plane originating from an air-
base in Japan is shot down over Russian airspace
1959, June Trade Union movement calls for a general strike
1959, October My Second Brother (Imamura Shōhei) opens
1959, October First draft of the revised Security Treaty is
published
1959, November 17 A Town of Love and Hope (Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1959, November 27 Nationwide 500,000 protest against the renewal of
the Security Treaty – students storm the entrance to
the Diet
1960 Desperado Outpost West (Okamoto Kihachi)

opens
1960 Naked Island (Shindō Kaneto) opens
1960, January 15 Haneda Incident: students occupy Haneda Airport
in a bid to prevent PM Kishi from flying to
Washington on the following day
1960, January 19 PM Kishi agrees the revised Security Treaty in
Washington
1960, January 25 Strike at the Mitsui, Miike Coal Mines in Kyushu
begins and continues for 282 days
1960, April 26 Students strike and the People’s Council takes a
petition to the Diet
1960, May Wakaki Nihon no kai formed by a group of dissen-
tient young artists including Ōe Kenzaburō,
Ishihara Shintarō and Terayama Shūji
1960, May 19 Revised Security Treaty put to the vote in the Diet –
opposition party members are prevented from
entering the building
1960, May 20 and 21 Protests around the Diet building continue
1960, June Cruel Story of Youth (Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1960, June 10 Hagerty Incident: James C. Hagerty, President
Eisenhower’s press secretary, arrives in Japan ahead
of the President’s planned visit on 19 July to be met
by 8,000 to 10,000 demonstrators
1960, June 15 People’s Council demonstrates against the revised
Security Treaty and against police violence during
the Hagerty Incident: students break into the Diet
perimeter and clash with police – Tokyo University
student Kanba Michiko dies in the struggle and 348
people are arrested. PM Kishi is forced to ask Presi-
dent Eisenhower to postpone his visit indefinitely
as the Japanese are unable to guarantee his safety
1960, June 18 PM Kishi resigns
1960, June 19 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (Nichibei
Sōgo Kyōryoku Hoshō Jōyaku) is ratified
1960, June 23 US–Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and
Security comes into effect
1960, June 24 Kanba Michiko’s funeral
1960 Democratic Socialist Party forms
1960, July 6 Good for Nothing (Yoshida Yoshishige) opens
1960, July 19 Ikeda Hayato becomes Prime Minister and
announces an ‘income doubling’ policy (shotoku
baizō)
1960, August The Sun’s Burial (Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1960, October 9 Night and Fog in Japan (Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1960, October 10 Blood is Dry (Yoshida Yoshishige) opens
1960, October 12 Socialist politician Asanuma Inejirō is assassinated

and Night and Fog in Japan is withdrawn from
cinemas
1961, January Pigs and Battleships (Imamura Shōhei) opens
1961, November The National Council for Peace and Against
Nuclear Weapons (Kakuheiki Kinshi Heiwa
Kensetsu Kokumin Kaigi known as Kakkin Kaigi)
forms
1962 Human (Shindō Kaneto) opens
1962 Japanese Art Theatre Guild forms as an ‘art theatre’
distribution company – soon enlarges to include
support for independent domestic film production
1963 She and He (Hani Susumu) opens
1963, November Insect Woman (Imamura Shōhei) opens
1963, November 22 Kennedy assassination
1964 Escape from Japan (Yoshida Yoshishige) opens
1964 Woman of the Dunes (Teshigahara Hiroshi)
opens
1964 The Kōmeitō political party is formed by the lay
Buddhist organization Sōka Gakkai
1964, January 19 The US battleship Enterprise, which was suspected
of carrying nuclear weapons, moors in Japan
1964, June Intentions of Murder (Imamura Shōhei) opens
1964, October 10–24 Tokyo Olympic Games
1964, November 11 Satō Eisuke becomes Prime Minister, Satō is the
brother of former PM Kishi Nobusuke
1965 A Story Written in Water (Yoshida Yoshishige)
opens
1965 Secrets behind the Wall (Wakamatsu Kōji) opens
and is selected for the Berlin Film Festival
1965, February 7 United States begins its bombing campaign over
North Vietnam
1965, March United States enters the Vietnam War with full
force
1965, June 9 Black Snow opens, June 16 the film is confiscated
under the Obscenity Law
1965, August Pleasures of the Flesh (Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1965 Treaty normalizing relations between Japan and
Korea is signed
1965 The Japan Congress against Atomic and Hydrogen
Bombs (Gensuibaku Kinshi Nihon Kokumin Kagi
known as Gensuikin) forms
1965, April 24 Beheiren (People’s Organization for Peace in
Vietnam/Betonamu ni Heiwa o Shinmin Rengō) is
founded by the novelists Oda Makoto, Kaikō Ken,
and the social scientist Tsurumi Shinsuke
1965, June 9 Sōhyō (General Council of Trade Unions of Japan/

Nihon Rōdō Kumiai Sōhyō), the Japan Socialist
Party and the JCP hold the first big national rally
against the War in Vietnam drawing 108,000 people
according to police figures
1966 Patriotism (Mishima Yukio) opens
1966, July The Pornographers (Imamura Shōhei) opens
1966, July Violence at Noon (Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1966, July The court in the Black Snow obscenity case opens
1965, September 18 Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir arrive in
Japan at the invitation of Keio University and
Watanabe Kazuo, the editor of the Japanese pub-
lishing house printing Sartre’s books
1967 Violated Angel (Wakamatsu Kōji) opens
1967, February–May Demonstrations against the lengthening of runways
at US military bases. The runways were to facilitate
the larger transport planes used to support the War
in Vietnam
1967, June A Man Vanishes (Imamura Shōhei) opens
1967, September Japanese Summer Double Suicide (Ōshima
Nagisa) opens
1967, October 8 The Haneda Incident of 1967: students battle riot
police in protest at PM Satō Eisuke’s visit to South-
east Asia: a Kyoto University student, Yamazaki
Hiroaki is killed in the struggle
1967, October Beheiren begin helping American military person-
nel desert from the armed forces
1967, November 11 Yui Tadanoshin fatally burns himself in protest
against the Vietnam War in front of the Prime
Minister’s residence in Nagatachō
1967, November 12 PM Satō leaves for the United States during a
second protest – 335 people are arrested
1967, November 13 Beheiren announces that four American naval
airmen have deserted ship in Japan and made their
way to the Soviet Union
1968 Adieu, Summer Light (Yoshida Yoshishige) opens
1968 Human Bullet (Okamoto Kihachi) opens
1968 Inferno of First Love (Hani Susumu) opens
1968, January Demonstrations against the visit of the nuclear
powered US aircraft carrier Enterprise to Sasebo
naval base
1968, January 23 North Korean gunboats seize the American spy
ship, the Pueblo
1968, February Death by Hanging (Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1968, February Beginnings of student involvement in the Narita

New Airport Struggle – local inhabitants had started
their own protest movement in 1967
1968, March American soldiers massacre hundreds of Vietnam-
ese citizens at the village of My Lai
1968, March 18 Oji Camp Hospital struggle: patients are being
brought to the Camp Hospital direct from Vietnam –
local inhabitants and students hold a series of
protests
1968, May 19–June 19 Beheiren calls for a non-violent National Anti-
Vietnam War Action Month
1968, June 26 The Ogasawara Islands are returned to Japan
1968–1969 University upheavals of 1968–1969 brings the uni-
versity education system to a halt. This time over
questions of University autonomy and the raising
of tuition fees
1968, October 21 International Anti-War Day mass demonstrations in
Shinjuku – the station is severely damaged and the
police box is attacked with Molotov cocktails
1968, December United States returns one third of its military bases
to Japanese control
1968, November Profound Desire of the Gods (Imamura Shōhei)
opens
1969 Eros + Massacre (Yoshida Yoshishige) opens
1969 Running in Madness Dying in Love, Go Go
Second Time Virgin, Season of Terror and Vio-
lence without a Cause (Wakamatsu Kōji) open
1969 Aka: Serial Killer (Adachi Masao) opens
1969, January 18 Riot Police move into Tokyo University campus –
the siege lasts two days before the police gain
control on the evening of 19 January
1969, February Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1969, February Beheiren holds a two-day conference – the confer-
ence expands the goals of the organization to
include opposition to the impending Treaty
renewal
1969, April 28 Large-scale demonstrations in support of the rever-
sion of Okinawa to Japan – it was on 28 April 1952
that Okinawa was first taken over by the United States
as part of the San Francisco Treaty agreements
1969, June Demonstrations in Tokyo against the Vietnam War,
the Security Treaty and demanding the return of
Okinawa; an estimated 60,000–70,000 people
attended
1969, July Boy (Ōshima Nagisa) opens

1969, August 19 The University Control Bill passes through both
houses of the Diet – a measure taken in light of the
1968–1969 campus disputes
1969 Red Army Faction (Sekigunha) splits from the
Bund
1969, September Inaugural meeting of the National Federation of the
All-Campus Joint Struggle Councils (Zengaku
Kyōtō Kaigi known as Zenkyōtō)
1969, September 5 Zenkyōtō holds a rally in Hibiya Park
1969, October 10 Zenkyōtō holds a series of demonstrations with sev-
eral of the anti-JCP sects of Zengakuren in 53 places
around the country to oppose PM Satō’s forthcom-
ing trip to Washington and the renewal of the
Treaty
1969, October 21 International Anti-War Day: at least 467,000 people
(police figures) or 860,000 people (Beheiren fig-
ures) protest – Shinjuku Station becomes the focus
of attack, various Police Boxes across the country
are also attacked with Molotov cocktails, 1,505
people are arrested throughout Japan
1969, September–October Violent uprisings instigated by the Red Army
known as the Tokyo War, the Osaka War and the
Kobe War. This includes attacks on five police
boxes (Kōban) with Molotov cocktails in Osaka
and Kobe on 22 September
1969, November 13–17 Rallies held throughout the country in protest
against PM Satō’s departure for the United States
on 17 November – on 16 November groups of radi-
cal students attempt to seize control of the Kamata
area near Hanada Airport, 1,857 people are arrested
throughout the country
1969, November 17 PM Satō leaves for the United States: 80 domestic
and 60 international flights to Hanada are cancelled
or rescheduled, 75,000 riot police are mobilized,
2,000 people are arrested and 82 people are
injured
1969, November 21 Satō-Nixon Communiqué is signed – Okinawa to
revert to Japanese sovereignty in 1972
1970 Purgatory Heroica (Yoshida Yoshishige) opens
1970 Sex Jack (Wakamatsu Kōji) opens
1970 Osaka Expo
1970 Renewal of the US–Japan Security Treaty
1970, March 31 Internal JAL flight is hijacked by members of the
Red Army Faction (Sekigunha) and flown to North
Korea
1970, June Post-war History of Japan as Told by a Bar

Hostess (Imamura Shōhei) opens
1970, June Tokyo Wars: The Man Who Left His Will on Film
(Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1970, June 23 Three quarters of a million people attend rallies
throughout the country to denounce the automatic
renewal of the Joint Security Treaty
1970, November 25 Yukio Mishima commits seppuku (hara-kiri) at the
headquarters of the Self Defence Forces
1971, July Ceremonies (Ōshima Nagisa) opens
1971, July 15 United Red Army (Rengō sekigunha) forms through
a merger of the Red Army Faction and an anarchist
group called Keihin Anpo Kyōtō
1971, July 15 President Nixon announces that he will shortly visit
the People’s Republic of China
1972 Ecstasy of the Angels (Wakamatsu Kōji) opens
1972 Goodbye CP (Hara Kazuo) opens
1972, February 19 Siege at Asano Sansō near Karuisawa in which
members of the Red Army fight with police
1972 Attack on Lod Airport, Israel by the Japanese Red
Army (Nihon sekigun) – 26 people die and 77 are
wounded
1972, May 15 Okinawa reverts to Japanese sovereignty
1972, July 6 Satō Eisuke stands down as Prime Minister and
Tanaka Kakuei assumes office
1972, August 31 PM Tanaka meets President Nixon in Honolulu
1972, September 29 PM Tanaka and Zhou Enlai sign agreement to nor-
malize relations between Japan and the People’s
Republic of China
1973 Coup d’État (Yoshida Yoshishige) opens
1973, January 9 Announcement of a cease-fire in the Vietnam War
1973, January 27 Combatants in Vietnam sign the Paris agreement
providing for the withdrawal of foreign military
forces from Indochina
1973, April 30 Kyoto branch of Beheiren officially disbands
1973, October 16 Price increase of petroleum by Arab exporting
states (OPEC) by 70 per cent. By 23 December,
price of petroleum has doubled
1974 Extreme Private Eros (Hara Kazuo) opens
1974, January 26 Tokyo branch of Beheiren disbands
1974 Satō Eisuke, former Prime Minister, receives Nobel
Peace Prize for normalizing relations with South
Korea and the reversion of Okinawa
INDEX
Abashiri Prison (Abashiri bangaichi) anti-american sentiment 93, 95

series 84, 104, 163n5 Aochi, Susumu 37–8
Abe, Kōbō 87 a priorism 4, 25, 28, 146–7
accountability 21, 33–4, 36, 45, 136–7, 146 Aristotle 160n9
action documentary 138 ‘art house’ cinema 5–7, 10
Adachi, Masao 77, 82, 103, 106–9, 112, artistic field 10
114, 155 Art Theatre 2, 3, 10, 17, 44, 63, 103,
Adieu, Summer Light (Saraba natsu no 159n4, 162n6
hikari/Adieu, lumière d’été) Art Theatre Guild (ATG) 2, 3, 6–9, 15,
Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 41–2, 17, 49, 55, 57–8, 71, 73, 92, 95, 107,
44, 147 122, 147, 149, 155, 157n4
aesthetics of economy 8 challenge of history and 57–62
aesthetics of taste 5–8 theatres of death and 62–72
Ah Etajima (Aa Etajima) Asahi Shinbun 93, 142
Murayama, Mitsuo 75 Asanuma, Inejirō 37, 160n14
Ah the Hayabusa Army Squadron (Aa Ashes and Diamonds (Popiól i diament)
rikugun Hayabusa sentōtai) Wajda, Andrzej 76, 146
Murayama, Mitsuo 75 Auschwitz 31
Ah the Zerosen Fighter Plane (Aa zerosen) auteur theory 4–6, 8, 10, 17, 22–4, 27,
Murayama, Mitsuo 75 126, 148–9, 158n10
Aka: Serial Killer (Ryakushō: renzoku autonomization 10
shasatsu ma) of collective memory 73
Adachi, Masao 108–9, 114 autonomy (shutaisei) 9, 17, 33–4, 73, 108
Akaza, Emiko 127 individual 16, 34, 38, 147
Akira 158n9 national 39
Ōtomo Katsuhiro 158n9 relative 11, 116
Akiyama, Michio 113 avant-garde 2, 4, 6, 9–12, 19–20, 31–2,
Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke 159n3 44–5, 50, 55, 58, 63, 74, 83–4,
Alexander, James 94, 96–7, 100–1, 113 146–7, 150, 153–6
Ali, Mohammad 100 Avignon Film Festival 57
amaeru 83
Amakasu, Masahiko 60, 161n3 Baldick, Robert 26, 161n2
amateur 124 Ballad of Narayama (Narayama bushikō)
Anderson, Lindsey 120 Imamura, Shōhei 80–1, 84, 87, 89, 91,
animal sexuality 100–2 102, 116
Anpo struggle 2, 38, 61, 88, 98, 119, 130, Barthes, Roland 24–5
155, 157n7 ‘The Death of the Author’ 23
— 187 —
188 Index
Bataille, Georges 77, 100, 102 Boy (Shōnen)

Eroticism 99 Ōshima, Nagisa 111
Battle Royale II Breathless (A bout de souffle)
Fukasaku, Kinji 1, 145–6, 157n1 Godard, Jean-Luc 146
Bazin, André Brechtian devices 67
‘Defence of Rossellini’ 30 Brechtian intertitles 73
Beauty and the Sorrow, The (Utsukushisa Broomfield, Nick 126
to kanashimi to) Brown, Andrew 23
Shinoda, Masahiro 93 Bruzzi, Stella 121–2, 126–8, 143
Beauvoir, Simone de 20 New Documentary 120
Beer, Lawrence W. 94 Burakumin 117–18, 128–9
Ben Hur discrimination 118
Wyler, William 7 Burch, Noël 33, 35, 62, 71–2
benshi/katsuben 4 To the Distant Observer 3
Bergman, Ingrid 19 Bushido: Samurai Saga (Bushidō zankoku
Bergson, Henri 56 monogatari)
Bergsonian derived ‘time-image’ 6, 147 Imai, Tadashi 97
Berlin International Film Festival 97, bushidō ethics 95
112, 148
Best of Kinema Junpō 15, 20 Campbell, Alan 163n4, 163n2 (Ch 4)
betrayal, sense of 32–3 Canal (Kanal)
Betsuyaku, Minoru 61–2 Wajda, Andrzej 146
Beyond the Clouds (Kumo nagaruru Cannes 58, 87, 107, 116
hateni) causality 27–8, 45, 56, 147
Ieki, Miyoji 27, 66 Ceremonies (Gishiki)
Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) Ōshima, Nagisa 56, 58, 62–3, 66–9,
De Sica, Vittorio 19, 26 71–2, 74, 79, 81, 87, 107, 147, 154
black-market (yamiichi) 91 Chekov, Anton 149
Black Rain/Kuroi ame Children of the Bomb (Genbaku no ko)
Imamura, Shōhei 47 Shindō, Kaneto 47
Black Snow (Kuroi yuki) choice 21, 24, 30, 34, 50, 138, 146,
Takechi, Tetsuji 12, 82, 93–6, 98–9, 159n8, 161n2
112, 148 free 28–9
Blood Thirsty (Le sang sec/Chi wa Chūō Kōron 157n2
kawaite iru cinema etiquette 8
Yoshida, Yoshishige 146 Civil Information Section 18
Bloody May Demonstrations (1952) 128, classic cinema 69
130 Cold War 18, 33–4, 72, 75
Bock, Audie 3 collective imagination 51
Bononno, Robert 110 collective memory 46–7, 50–1, 54–5, 60,
Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 6, 9–10, 12–13, 73–4, 147–8
44, 149 collective trauma 40
The Field of Cultural Production 5 comfort stations 75
‘Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Cominform 33–4
Works’ 10 commercial cinema 8, 11, 31–2, 46, 52–5
Index 189
Confucian-based family structure (ie) 61 Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu gurentai)

consciousness 40, 44, 54, 56–7, 67, 72, Okamoto, Kihachi 74
82, 85, 111–12 Desser, David 32–3, 38–9, 90
generational 149–50 Eros Plus Massacre 3
mass 33, 35 dialectics, of positions and
multiple layers of 23 dispositions 3–11
and popular music 54 Diary of Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku
transcendence of 24 dorobō nikki)
victimization 20, 51–2, 58 Ōshima, Nagisa 99, 102, 105, 156
consecration 6, 10, 12 Diary of Yunbogi (Yunbogi no nikki)
continuity editing 58 Ōshima, Nagisa 154
Coup d’État (Kaigenrei) discommunication 27
Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 55, 57–9, disposition 3–4, 10–11, 17, 50, 117, 149
61, 71 self-negation (Jiko hitei) 21–30
Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu) Doi, Takeo 83
Nakahira, Kō 16, 28–9, 45, 146–7 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 55
creator and created, distantiation Dower, John 154–5, 159n6, 160n15
between 26 Embracing Defeat (Haiboku
Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun zankoku o dakishimeru) 2
monogatari) Dream of the Red Chamber (Kōkeimu)
Ōshima, Nagisa 69, 76, 146–7 Takechi, Tetsuji 93
cultural production 44 Dry Wind (Karakkaze yarō)
large-scale 5 Masumura, Yasuzō 71
Cybulski, Zbigniew 76
Ecstasy of the Angels (Tenshi no kōkotsu)
Daiei Studios 6, 92 Wakamatsu, Kōji 103, 107, 110
Daiei Tokyo Studio 75 Eiren 97–8, 112, 148
Daisuke, Miyao 4, 22 Eirin 97
Dale, Peter N. 162n2 Eisenstein, Sergei 22
Daydream (Hakujitsumu) empathy 18, 26, 83, 141, 152–3
Takechi, Tetsuji 93 Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,
death, theatres of 62–72 The (Yuki yukite, shingun)
Death by Hanging (Kōshikei) Hara, Kazuo 120–1, 134, 138–9, 144,
Ōshima, Nagisa 56–7, 64, 73, 108, 111, 152–4
114, 147, 154, 162n5 Empire of Passion (Ai no bōrei)
death of author; theory Ōshima, Nagisa 155
see ‘denial of self’ theory enunciation 31–2, 56, 63
Deleuze, Gilles 31, 55–6, 69, 73, Eros + Massacre (Erosu + gyakusatsu)
158n10 Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 19, 55,
Cinema I: Movement-Image 6 57–60, 65–6, 68–9, 73, 76–7, 79, 87,
Cinema II: Time-Image 6 147, 159n4, 162n6
democratization and postwar society 16 eroticism and sexuality 100
‘denial of self’ theory 58 ethnology 86
de-realization 55, 150 etymological connections 87
De Sica, Vittorio 19, 26, 44 Eureka (Yuriika) 25, 151
190 Index
existentialism 16, 20–1, 28–9, 45–6, 50, Fukasaku, Kinji 1, 121, 131–4, 143–6,
54, 62, 69, 146 149, 154
‘Existentialism and the Image’ Eiga Kantoku Fukasaku Kinji 157n1
(Jitsuzonshugi to eizō) 56 Fullbrook, Edward 23
exposition 4, 11, 66, 128, 131, 136, Fullbrook, Kate 23
139–44 Furuhata, Yuriko 109–10
external history 10–11
Extreme Private Eros (Kyokushiteki Garson, Greer 19
erosu: koiuta 1974) Genet, Jean 145
Hara, Kazuo 138, 142 The Thief’s Journal 99–100, 156
Gerow, Aron 5
Fahrenheit 451 Godard, Jean-Luc 146
Truffaut, François 100 Go Go Second Time Virgin (Yuke
family register (koseki) 90 yuke nidome no shojo)
female sexuality 57, 87, 89–90, 105–7 Wakamatsu, Kōji 113
field of cultural production 5, 9–12, 24, Gomikawa, Junpei
38, 44, 83, 149 Kobayashi, Masaki 160n13
Film Art (Eiga Geijutsu) 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, Gone with the Wind 128, 130
17, 37, 56, 60, 88, 93–5 Goodbye CP (Sayonara CP)
Flame of Feeling (Honō to onna/ Hara, Kazuo 138
Flamme et femme) Good for Nothing (Roku de nashi/
Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 75 Bon à rien)
flashback structure 28, 35, 42, 45, Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 28, 147
52–3, 68, 146–7 Gordon, Andrew 154
folklore studies 81, 83, 86, 148 Gosha, Hideo
food and sex, link between 119 Killer (Hitokiri) 71
Forgacs, David 30 Grass, Günter 49–50
forgetting 40–1, 46, 151 Greengrass, Paul 1
Forgotten Soldiers (Wasurerareta kōgun) Grigsby, Mike 120
Ōshima, Nagisa 141, 143, 154
Foucault, Michael 51 Hani, Gorō 149, 163n1 (Reflections)
Four Hundred Blows, The (Le quatre Hani, Susumu 7, 87, 97, 163n1
cents coup) (Reflections)
Truffaut, François 146 Hara, Kazuo 12, 115, 120–1, 131, 136,
Frechtman, Bernard 145 138–9, 142–4, 152–4
free choice 28–9 Camera Obtrusa: The Action
Free Cinema movement 120 Documentaries of Hara
freedom 20–1, 34, 69–71 Kazuo 134–5
free love 69 Hara, Setsuko 44
free sex 61, 76–7 Harootunian, Harry D. 84, 86, 108
Freud, Sigmund 99 Harp of Burma (Biruma no tategoto)
Fujin Kōron 38 Ichikawa, Kon 51
Fujioka, Nobukatsu Harukawa, Masumi 87
History Not Taught in Textbooks Hashimoto, Jun 34, 46, 160n13
(Kyōkasho ga oshienai rekishi) 52 Havens, Thomas R. H. 160n16
Index 191
Hayakawa, Yoshie 122–6, 163n5 (Ch 4) illusory reality 56–7

‘heart-warming humanism’ of De Sica’s image 16, 18–19, 21, 23, 25–6, 30–2, 43,
films 26 49, 51, 53, 56, 58–9, 67–9, 71, 87, 91,
Hidari, Sachiko 87, 97, 116, 131, 149 98–9, 121, 124, 127–9, 140–1, 143,
high culture, cinema as 5–6 145, 148, 151–3, 163n1
High Treason Incident (Taigyaku Jiken) autonomization of 73
(1910) 59–61 graphic 113
Higuchi, Naofumi 29, 71 interpretation of 159n8
Hirasawa, Gō 62 and montage theory 22
Hiroshima mon amour movement- 6, 69, 75, 158n10
Resnais, Alain 31, 39–40, 42, 44–6, 49, photographic 50
56, 73, 132, 143, 148, 151, 161n17 social 86
historical discourse 56, 59, 140 still 105, 117, 141
historical event 51–2, 54, 56–7, 73, 76, time- 6, 158n10
127, 148–50 imagination 43, 51, 56, 61, 66, 71, 76,
historiography 2, 19, 31–2, 40, 54–5, 77, 84, 98, 106, 152–3
79, 84, 115–16, 130, 143, 150 Imai, Tadashi 27–8, 51, 53–4, 62, 97,
history, challenge of 57–62 136, 147, 158n2
Hitchcock, Alfred 98 Imamura, Shōhei 2, 12, 47, 76–7, 79–91,
hometown (kokyō) 86 97, 99–102, 112, 115–31, 134,
H story 139–40, 143–4, 148–9, 152, 154,
Suwa, Nobuhiro 40, 151 157n2, 163nn4–5 (Ch 4)
Human (Ningen) Imperial System 61
Shindō, Kaneto 87 impotence see male impotence
Human Bullet (Nikudan) incest 57, 87–91, 101–2
Okamoto, Kihachi 19, 56, 64, 66–7, individual autonomy (shutaiseiron) 16,
73, 147, 161n4 34, 38, 147
Human Condition (Ningen no jōken) individual freedom 20–1, 69–71
Kobayashi, Masaki 160n13 Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi jigokuhen)
humanism 26, 33, 37, 62, 74, 146 Hani, Susumu 87
Human Promise, The (Ningen no In Search of Un-Repatriated Soldiers
yakusoku) (Mikikanhei o otte)
Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 155 Imamura, Shōhei 121, 126, 139, 154,
Husserl, Edmund 149–50 163n4 (Ch 4)
Ideas 149 Insect Woman (Nippon konchūki)
Imamura, Shōhei 12, 79, 84, 86–9, 102,
Ichikawa, Kon 116–17, 119–21, 126, 129–30, 143–4
Harp of Burma (Biruma no tategoto) 51 Institute of Contemporary Art in
identity crisis 34 London 158n9
Ieki, Miyoji 27, 66 Intentions of Murder (Akai satsui)
Ienaga, Saburō 39, 49, 163n3 Imamura, Shōhei 79, 81, 87–8
ie system 80–1, 87, 129, 148, 162n1, internal historicity, of field 10–11
163n4 In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no koriida)
Iguchi, Rikihei 67 Ōshima, Nagisa 12, 100, 155
Ikeda, Hayato 38, 45 Irikawa, Yasunori 57
192 Index
Ishihama, Akira 93 Killer (Hitokiri)

Ishihara, Shintarō 29 Gosha, Hideo 71
Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu) Kimura, Akira 35–6
(novel) 17 Kinema Junpō 1, 20
Ishihara, Yūjirō 16, 45 Kinoshita, Keisuke 27, 45, 93
Italian neo-realist movement 11, 18, 26, Kinsella, Sharon 158n9
44–5, 50, 146 Kishi, Nobusuke 38, 160n15
Itō, Noe 60–1, 65–6, 68–70, 79, 162n6 kisō shakai 84
Iwabuchi, Koichi 150 Kita, Ikki 58, 60–2, 100
I Want to be Reborn a Shellfish The Fundamental Principles for the
(Watashi wa kai ni naritai) Reorganization of Japan (Nihon
Hashimoto, Jun 34, 46, 160n13 Kaizō Hōan) 59
Iwasaki, Akira 72 Kitahara, Mie 16
Kitamura, Kazuo 89
Jameson, Fredric 24, 51, 54–7, 73, Knife in the Water (Noz w wodzie)
150, 161n2 Polanski, Roman 146
Japanese Communist Party 33, 37 Kobayashi, Masaki 93, 160n13
Japanese Red Army 107, 155 Kohso, Sabu 108
Japanese Summer: Double Suicide Koizumi, Junichirō 2
(Muri shinjū Nihon no natsu) Korean mission 142
Ōshima, Nagisa 9, 154 Korean War 38–9, 161n16
Japanese Tragedy, A (Nihon no higeki) Kōsaiwa, Saburō 110
Kinoshita, Keisuke 27, 45 Koschmann, J. Victor 16, 33–4, 154–5
Joyce, James 55 Kōyama, Seijirō 51, 54
Kurita, Isamu 56–7
Kaku, Atsuko 64 Kurosawa, Akira 8, 18, 32, 44–5, 50,
Kamichika, Ichiko 69, 79 147, 149
kamikaze forces 16, 19, 64, 67, 119, Kyoko, Hirano 4, 22
158n1 Kyoto Daiei Studio 67
kamikaze genre 27, 66 Kyoto studios 9
Kantō Earthquake 60–1
Kara, Jūrō 105–6, 113 landscape theory 108–12
Karayukisan Lang, Fritz 75
Imamura, Shōhei 80, 116–18, 139–40 Last Year at Marienbad (L’annèe dernière
Katori, Shunsuke 84–5, 118–19, 121, 149 à Marienbad)
Katzenstein, Peter J. 157n6, 157–8n7 Resnais, Alain 42, 73, 148
Kawabata, Yasunari Lawson, Dawn 25, 45, 142
The Beauty and the Sorrow Le Fanu, Mark 5
(Utsukushisa to kanashimi to) 93 Lefebvre, Henri 103, 110
Snow Country (Yuki guni) 93 Lefebvre, Martin 109
Kawakita, Kashiko 6, 7–8 Lehmann, Jean-Pierre 80, 162n1
Kawakita, Nagamasa 7 Liberal Democratic Party 2, 82
Kawalerowicz, Jerzy 7 Liberation of Nevers 40
Kawarasaki, Kenzō 81 Listen to the Roar of the Ocean (Kike,
Kiarostami, Abbas 8 wadatsumi no koe)
Kido, Shirō 45 Sekigawa, Hideo 51
Index 193
‘literature of the flesh’ school (nikutai generational 54

bungaku) 16, 21, 119 instability of 43
Lunar Child (Runa no kodomo) institutional 72
Suzuki, Akihiro 111 reflective 67
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence
McCormack, Gavin (Senjō no meriikurisumasu)
‘The Japanese Movement to “Correct” Ōshima, Nagisa 155
History’ 52 miai system, of marriage interviews 80
MacDonald, Keiko 3, 73 Miller, Henry 100
Mairet, Philip 29, 159n8 Minear, Richard H. 39, 49
male impotence 57, 75, 79, 87, 91, 95, mise-en-scène 4, 19, 23, 29, 35, 55, 59,
99, 101–2, 106, 113–14 89, 99–100
Manchurian Motion Picture Association Mishima, Yukio 83, 95–6, 134
(Man’ei) 17, 161n3 For the Young Samurai 71
Man Vanishes, A (Ningen jōhatsu) Mitani, Noboru 133
Imamura, Shōhei 80, 115, 120, 122, Mizoguchi, Kenji 45
124–6, 144 Mochizuki, Yoshirō 37–8
Marx, Karl modernism 49, 55, 82, 90, 110, 150
Capital 108 monologues 42–3, 128
Masumura, Yasuzō montage theory 36, 58, 142
Dry Wind (Karakkaze yarō) 71 and image 22, 32
Matsubayashi, Shue Moore, Michael 126, 138–9
The Sacrifice of the Human Torpedoes morality and sexuality 100
(Ningen gyorai kaiten) 27–8, 53, 62, Mori, Iwao 7
66, 147 Morris, Ivan 67
Matsuda, Masao 103–4, 109, 111–12 Mother Joan of the Angels
Matsui, Yasuko 87 (Matka Joanna od aniolow)
Matsushima, Toshiyuki 92–3, 95 Kawalerowicz, Jerzy 7
Matsushita, Keiichi 88, 115 Muraoka, Iheiji 140
Mautner, Thomas 150 Murayama, Mitsuo 75
Max mon amour My Second Brother (Nianchan)
Ōshima, Nagisa 155 Imamura, Shōhei 86
May Day Incident (1952) 88, 162n3 myths and contemporary society 85
Meiji, Emperor 59
Meiji Restoration (1868) 59-60, 110, Nagayama, Norio 108–10, 114
118 Tears of Ignorance (Muchi no
Mellon, Joan 3 namida) 108
Memorial to the Lilies (Himeyuri no tō) Nakahira, Kō 16, 28, 45, 146–7
Imai, Tadashi (1953 and 1982 Nakahira, Takuma 108
versions) 51, 54, 136 Nakamura, Otsuo 63, 88
Kōyama, Seijirō (1995 version) 51, 54 Nakane, Chie 83
memory 12, 18, 33, 40, 42, 44, 49, 53, 56, Nakasone, Seizan 53–4
76, 116, 131, 133, 145, 149 Nakayama, H. 1
collective 46–7, 50–1, 54–5, 60, Naked Island, The (Hadaka no shima)
73–4, 147–8 Shindō, Kaneto 87
as filter of experience 31–2, 47, 53 Napier, Susan J. 158n9
194 Index
narrative 3–4, 18–19, 24, 26–30, 32–3, obscenity law 93–5

35–6, 51–9, 66, 68, 72–6, 79–84, see also pink films
91, 107, 109, 112, 129–31, 134, official Japan and real version, distinction
138, 140, 143, 146–8, 158n10 between 82–4, 92, 98
see also individual entries off-screen voice-over dialogue 42
Naruse, Mikio 84 Ogata, Ken 89
national autonomy 39 Ogawa, Shinsuke 141
naturalism 15, 31, 38, 55, 80–1, 83, 87, Ogawa, Tetsu 77, 85, 99
102, 112, 121, 148, 150 Ogawa, Toru 79, 88, 115
New Guinea campaign 131–2, 135, Oguma, Eiji 2, 38–9
149, 152 Okada, Eiji 40, 44, 53, 62
New Left 33–5 Okada, Mariko 42, 57, 65–6
Nichidai Eiken 157n4 Okamoto, Kihachi 2, 47, 55–6, 64, 66,
Nichols, Bill 121, 130–1, 134, 138–40 73–4, 147, 161n4
Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) Okiyama, Hideko 87
Resnais, Alain 31–3, 35–6, 40, 42, Okuzaki, Kenzō 120, 130, 134–9, 143, 152–3
45, 49 The Philosophy of ‘God’s Army’ (Yuki
Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru yukite ‘Shingun’ no shisō) 135
to kiri) Old Left 33, 35–6
Ōshima, Nagisa 9, 17, 32–8, 55, 68, Onboro, Madam 116–17, 122, 126–30
119, 145 ‘one-scene one-cut’ technique 35–6
nihonjinron 2, 73, 83, 116 Ōnishi, Takijirō 67
Nikkatsu Studios 6, 17, 45, 79, 92–3, 121 Onuma, Yasuaki 160n11
Nixon, Richard 154 orgy, of pre-modern times 102
Noble, David 163n4, 163n2 (Ch 4) originary society (kisō shakai) 76–7, 79,
Noma, Hiroshi 31 88, 115–16
non-commercialism (hishōgyōshugi) 7 Orr, James
non-fiction 117, 120, 123, 126, 143 The Victim as Hero 52
Non-Fiction Theatre (Nonfikuikushon Osada, Norio 131
Gekijō) Ōshima, Nagisa 2, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 20,
Ōshima, Nagisa 141–2 24–5, 28, 31–9, 44–5, 47, 50, 55,
Noonan, Pat 115, 131, 135, 138 57–8, 62–4, 66–9, 71–4, 76, 79,
No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni 81–2, 87, 95, 100, 102–3, 105,
kuinashi) 107–8, 111–14, 119, 141–3, 145–9,
Kurosawa, Akira 18, 44 154–6, 157n3, 160n12, 162n5
Nornes, Abé Mark 141 Ōshima, Tadashi 123–5
Nosaka, Akiyuki Ōsugi, Sakae 19, 60–2, 65–6, 69–70, 76,
The Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no 79, 162n6
haka) 157n2 Ōtani, Hiroshi 37
The Pornographers (Erogotoshitachi) Ozaki, Hotsumi 18
157n2 Ozawa, Shōichi 99
Nouvelle Vague 2, 31, 44, 50, 157n3 Ozu, Yasujirō 4, 8, 83–4, 159n7
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 30–2
Pacific War and the International Tribunal,
Ōba, Hideo 93, 159n2 The (Daitōa sensō to kokusai saiban)
objectivity 5, 30, 126, 148, 159n8 Komori, Kiyoshi 34
Index 195
Paisà post-war society 16, 18, 29, 46, 100, 110,

Rossellini, Roberto 18, 27, 30 127–34, 137, 146, 149–50, 158n1
past-present, importance of 42 power 51–2, 63, 72, 91, 108–10, 112,
past reality 56–7 116, 133
Patriotism (Yūkoku) praxis 20–1, 44
Mishima, Yukio 71, 95–6 present reality 56–7
Peace Preservation Laws (1925/1929) 61 Profound Desire of the Gods (Kamigami
perception and phenomenology, distinction no fukaki yokubō)
between 159n8 Imamura, Shōhei 81, 84, 87–9, 102, 116
performative documentary and realist Proust, Marcel 56
aesthetic 120, 122–5, 143 publicized films (kōkoku eiga) 8
Perkins, V. F. 6, 8 pure gaze 12
personal nature, of documentary 139 Purgatory Heroica (Rengoku eroika
personal trauma 40 (Purgatoire eroica)
phenomenological representation Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 55, 57
and naturalism, distinction
between 150 racial homogeneity see nihonjinron
and perception, distinction between 159n8 Rancho Notorious
photographs 12, 21, 31, 42, 49–50, 71, Lang, Fritz 75
100, 105, 117, 129, 131, 142, Rashomon
151–2, 162n6 Kurosawa, Akira 32, 50, 147, 149
physical space 42 Ray, Satyajit 8
Pigs and Battleships (Buta to gunkan) realism 12, 19, 32, 67, 74, 87, 120, 143–4
Imamura, Shōhei 79, 86, 119 traditional 49
Pilgrim in the Snow (Juhyō no yoromeki/ realist aesthetic and performative
Amours dans la neige) documentary 120, 122–5, 143
Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 75 reality 5, 15, 21, 26–7, 30–1, 49, 51,
pink films 82, 91–101, 105–6, 112–13, 55, 74, 89–90, 99, 103, 118, 120–3,
148, 163n6 125, 129, 143–4, 152
Pleasures of the Flesh (Etsuraku) as burdensome 22
Ōshima, Nagisa 9 on camera 22 see also individual films
Polanski, Roman 146 cinema 122
popular music and consciousness 54 consciousness and 24
Pornographers (Erogotoshitachi yori economic 9
jinruigaku nyūmon) experiential 18–19, 28, 147, 151
Imamura, Shōhei 81, 86, 99, 101–2 external 24–5
possibles 10–11 types of 56–7
post-defeatism 1–2, 15–16, 18–20, 27–8, Rear Window
33–4, 66, 91, 115, 118–19, 145, 149, Hitchcock, Alfred 98
159n3 Record (Kiroku) 31, 35–6
Post-War History of Japan as Told Red Army – Popular Front for the
by a Bar Hostess, The (Nippon Liberation of Palestine: Declaration
sengoshi madamu Onboro of World War, The (Akagun – P.F.L.P:
no seikatsu) sekai sensō sengen)
Imamura, Shōhei 12, 80, 116–17, 120, Wakamatsu Kōji and Adachi,
122, 126–31, 143–4 Masao 155
196 Index
Red Flag Incident (1908) 60 Saikaku 149

Red Purge 1, 33, 38–9, 61 Sakaguchi, Ango 21, 149, 159n6
reflexive documentary 121–30, 136 ‘Discourse on Decadence’
reimagining 40, 46, 151 (Darakuron) 16
Reisz, Karel 120, 146 samuraization, of lower classes see ie
remembering see memory system
Remnants of Chivalry in the Shōwa Era San Francisco Treaty (1952) 142, 162n3
(Shōwa zankyōden) series 84 Sartre, Jean-Paul 11, 15, 21, 28, 44, 56,
representation 3–4, 6, 11–12, 26, 28, 33, 145, 149
45–6, 49–50, 56–7, 63, 67, 71, 76, Being and Nothingness 159n4
81, 106, 120–1, 123, 125–6, 130, ‘Existentialism and Humanism’ 159n8
134, 143–4, 147–51, 160n13 ‘Intimate’ (Mizuirasu’) 159n6
see also individual entries Nausea 20, 26, 159nn3–4, 6, 161n2
Resnais, Alain 11, 31–3, 35–6, 38–40, The Transcendence of the Ego 23,
42, 44–7, 49–50, 56, 73, 132, 143, 159n9
148, 151 The Wall 25
restricted production 5 What is Literature? 20
revolution 10, 22, 33, 59, 70, 111–12, Sasabu, Akira 66, 158n1
154–5 Sassa, Atsuyuki
Reynolds, Henry Yakeato no seishun (My Youth in the
Why Weren’t We Told? 157n5 Burnt-Out Ruins) 157n2
Richie, Donald 82–4, 88 Satō, Kei 63, 88
Riefenstahl, Leni 152 Satō, Makoto 75
Riva, Emanuelle 40, 143 Satō, Tadao 31, 54, 63, 71–2, 92, 99, 141
Roger and Me 138 Sato-Nixon Communiqué 107
romanporno genre 92 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Rome Open City (Roma, città aperta) Sillitoe, Alan 146
Rossellini, Roberto 18, 28, 30 Scenario (Shinario) 159n5
Rosenstone, Robert A. Season of Terror (Gendai kōshokuden
Revisioning History: Film and the teroru no kisetsu)
Construction of a New Past 161n17 Wakamatsu, Kōji 111, 113
Rossellini, Roberto 18, 26–8, 30, 44, 50 Season of the Sun (Taiyō no kisetsu)
Roth, Michael S. Furukawa, Takumi 17
Hiroshima Mon Amour: You Must Sea with No Exit, The (Deguchi no nai umi)
Remember This 161n17 Sasabu, Akira 66, 158n1
Running in Madness Dying in Love Secrets behind the Wall (Kabe no naka
(Kyōsō jōshikō) no hiji)
Wakamatsu, Kōji 106 Wakamatsu, Kōji 97–8, 111–12, 148
Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) 140 Sekigawa, Hideo
Listen to the Roar of the Ocean
sacrifice 16, 34, 49, 52, 66–8, 134, (Kiki, wadatsumi no koe) 51
137, 149 Self Defence Forces 71
Sacrifice of the Human Torpedoes, The self-negation (Jiko hitei) 21–30
(Ningen gyorai kaiten) Seo, Yukio 138
Matsubayashi, Shue 27–8, 53, 62, sex 56, 61, 76–7, 88, 92, 99, 102, 104–7,
66, 147 113–14, 119
Index 197
Sex Jack (Seizoku: sekkusu jyakku) spectator 23–4, 28, 31, 43, 57, 59, 66–8,
Wakamatsu, Kōji 104, 106–7, 111–13 87, 128, 147, 151
sexuality 57, 79, 82, 87, 89–90, 95–6, enfranchisement of 25
99–101, 105–7, 113–14, 119 experience as 26
see also individual entries Stalin, Joseph
Sharp, Jasper 107 Problems of Leninism 100
She and He (Kanojo to kare) Standish, Isolde
Hani, Susumu 97 Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese
Shimizu, Masahi 90, 115, 124–6 Cinema 158n1, 160n11, 161nn1, 4,
Shindō, Kaneto 47, 87, 131 163n5
Shinjuku ATG venue 8, 9, 107 A New History of Japanese Cinema 4,
Shinoda, Masahiro 93 158n1, 160n11, 162n5, 163nn5, 7
Shintō deity 86, 89 Oral Traditions: Performance
Shin Tōhō 92 Literature 158n8
Shirai, Kōji 159n6 state terrorism 62
Shōchiku ōfuna (Tokyo) Studios 9 Stone, Oliver 1
Shōchiku Studios 6, 9, 17, 37, 45, 79, Story Written in Water, A (Mizu de
84, 92–3, 157n3 kakareta monogatari/Histoire écrite
Shoeshine (Sciuscia) par l’eau)
De Sica, Vittorio 19, 26 Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 24, 56–7,
shōshimingeki (films about the lower 75, 87
middle classes) 84 Strindberg, August 149
Shōwa Emperor 2, 84, 135–6, 153 subjectivity 12, 15–16, 29–30, 56, 73, 126
Shōwa Restoration (ishin) 59 true 33, 35
shutaisei see autonomy (shutaisei) subject–object (shutai/taishō)
Sillitoe, Alan 146 distinction 141
Slaymaker, Doug 19–21, 159n6 Subversive Activities Prevention Law
Snow Country (Yuki guni) 93 (Hakai Katsudō Bōshihō known as
Ōba, Hideo 93 the Habōhō) 33, 35, 39, 59, 61
social hierarchy (teihen) 88 Suga, Hidemi 2
socialization 16, 111 Sunagawa Incident 119–20
social obligation 33 Sun’s Burial (Taiyō no hakaba)
social taboos 76–7, 87–91, 101–2 Ōshima, Nagisa 69, 146
solidarity 86 sun tribe (taiyōzoku) 15–17, 28–9, 45,
Sontag, Susan 3, 152–3 66, 147
Regarding the Pain of Others 49–50, 151 superior films (yūshū eiga) 7
Sorrow and the Pity, The (Le chagrin Suwa, Nobuhiro 25, 40–2, 46–7, 150–1
et la pitié) symbolic capital 5, 8, 9–10
Ophuls, Marcel 19
space 10, 21–2, 26, 30, 57–8, 69, 143 taiyōzoku generation 74
exterior 109 Takakura, Ken 104, 163n5
physical 42 Takakuwa, Sumio 16
social 110 Takechi, Tetsuji 12, 82, 93–6, 98–9, 112
and time 27, 71, 103, 110, 134 Takeda, Miyuki 138, 143
Special Attack Forces see kamikaze forces Takemitsu, Tōru 9
Speck, Richard 104 Takikawa, Yukitoki 19
198 Index
Takubo, Hideo 63 Twenty-Four Hour Romance, A

Tales of Japanese Chivalry (Nihon (Nijūyō jikan no jōji) see Hiroshima
kyōkakuden) series 84 mon amour
Tamura, Ryūichi 100 26 February 1936 Incident 60, 62,
Tamura, Taijirō (literature of the 71, 96
flesh) 16, 21
Tanaka, Kakuei 135 Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (Gunki
Tanizaki, Junichirō 93 wa hatameku moto ni)
Tankha, Brij 59–60 Fukasaku, Kinji 121, 131–4, 143–4,
Tayama, Rikiya 149, 154
‘Alain Resnais’s Distrust of Humanity, United 93
Night and Fog’ (Alain Resnais no Greengrass, Paul 1
ningen fushin) 36 Until the Day We Meet Again (Mata au
tension, physicality of 35–6 hi made)
Terada, Minori 64 Imai, Tadashi 27–8, 53–4, 62, 147,
Terayama, Shūji 9 158n2
Teshigahara, Hiroshi 2, 87 Upham, Frank K. 118
Three Resurrected Drunkards, The urbanization (danchi) 86, 98, 110–11
(Kaette kita yopparai) US–Japan Joint Security Treaty 39, 107,
Ōshima, Nagisa 9 157n7, 162n3
Tōei, Kyoto 97 US Morale Analysis Division 52
Tōei Studios 6, 17, 84 Usui, Hiroshi 92
Tōhō Studios 6, 7, 9, 39, 74, 84
Toita, Michizō 80–1 Vengeance is Mine (Fukushū suru wa
Tōjō, Hideki 60, 160n15 ware ni ari)
Tokoro, Jōji 160n13 Imamura, Shōhei 157n2
Tokyo Olympics (1964) 92, 98 victimization consciousness (higaisha
Tokyo War Crimes Trial 160n11 ishiki) 20, 51–2, 58, 73, 148
Tokyo Wars: The Man Who Left His Will on victimization theme 27–8, 30, 32, 34, 46,
Film, The (Tōkyō sensō sengo hiwa) 51–2, 54, 62, 74–5, 136, 146–7
Ōshima, Nagisa 107–8, 155 Vietnam War 94, 161n16
Tomioka, Taeko 100 Violated Angel (Okasareta hakui)
Tōwa Shōji 7 Wakamatsu, Kōji 104, 106–7,
Town of Love and Hope, A (Ai to kibō no 111, 113
machi) Violence at Noon (Hakuchū no tōrima)
Ōshima, Nagisa 146 Ōshima, Nagisa 9
tragic hero paradigm 27, 30, 52, 75, Violence without a Cause (Riyū naki bōkō)
150, 158n1 Wakamatsu, Kōji 104
trauma 31–2, 39–40, 42, 51–3, 56, 73, visual-style, utilization of 33, 58–9, 73–4,
143, 148, 161n17 81, 86, 143, 146–8, 150
Treatise on Bawdy Songs, A (Nihon voice-of-god narration 64, 127–8
shunkakō) voice-over conversation 42–3, 64, 67,
Ōshima, Nagisa 154 110, 139–40, 143
Truffaut, François 100, 146 voyeurism 98–9, 105
Tsujinaka, Yutaka 157n6, 157-8n7
Tsuyuguchi, Shigeru 123–4 Wagner, Richard
Turim, Maureen 3, 5, 32 Tristan and Isolde 71
Index 199
Wagstaff, Christopher Yakeato Yamiichi-ha 157n2

Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Yamada, Kichitarō 136–7
Real 30 Yanagita, Kunio 81, 83–4, 86,
Wajda, Andrzej 76, 146 115, 148
Wakamatsu, Kōji 2, 82, 93, 97–8, Yokota, Hiroshi 138
103–4, 106–8, 110–14, 148, Yomota, Inuhiko 3, 65–6, 104, 111–13
155, 163n6 Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 2, 4, 6,
Wakamatsu Productions 97 11, 15, 17–28, 30, 40–2, 44–7,
war-retro genre 20, 27–8, 30, 46, 51–5, 50, 55–62, 65, 68–9, 71, 73, 75–7,
58, 64, 136, 147 79, 82, 87, 112–13, 143, 146–51,
What is Your Name? (Kimi no na wa) 155, 157n3, 159nn3–5, 7,
Ōba, Hideo 158n2 160n10, 162n6
White, Hayden 49, 51, 55–6, 73, 116, ‘For Films That are Not Mine: The
148, 150 Logic of Self-Negation’ 23
Woman of the Dunes (Suna no onna) ‘The Glory and Misery of Post-War
Teshigahara, Hiroshi 87 Films: Narrative and the Destruction
Women in the Mirror, The (Kagami no of the Subject’ 27
onnatachi/Femmes en miroir) ‘In the Present Times What are
Yoshida, (Kijū) Yoshishige 24, 40–1, We to Assert?’ (Gendai ni nani
143, 147, 150–1 o shuchō suru ka) 27
Woolf, Virginia 55, 152 Ozu’s Anti-Cinema 21
Three Guineas 151 ‘Visual Anarchy’ (Miru koto no
World Literature (Sekai Bungaku) 159n6 anākizumu) 21, 26
World Trade Center ‘What is Meant by Cinematic
Stone, Oliver 1 Methodology?’ (Eiga no hōhōron
Wyler, William 7 to wa nanika) 21–2, 53
Yoshida, Shigeru 39
Yakeatoha (generation of the burnt-out Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro 5
ruins) 1 Yutaka, Tsujinaka 157n6, 157–8n7

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POLITICS, PORN

The Continuum International Publishing Group

Copyright © 2011 Isolde Standish

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Better be wrong and murder no one than be right in a slaughter-

Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements ix

1 Film and Philosophy: Towards

Due to the great breadth of a topic of this nature, I cannot claim to be

At a time when the major studios were in the early stages of an

A Dialectic of Positions and Dispositions

in the theatre, cinema, painting or literature, claim to establish the

In A New History of Japanese Cinema (2006), I argued that the relation-

informs many contemporary English language commentaries on Japanese

In contrast to the field of large-scale cultural production, which submits

This is perhaps best understood as expressing the extreme position of the

‘classic’. Equally, the monopoly authority of the critic, or increasingly the

ATG, ‘superior films’ (yūshū eiga) and the emphasis on ‘non-commercialism’

lists an extensive 14-point manifesto which alludes to this educational role

principal productions of Japan’s 1960s avant-garde filmmakers – artistic

As Bourdieu demonstrates, within the field of a given art form, ‘symbolic

Paradoxically, in those fields which are the site of permanent revolution,

Closely linked to the notion of ‘possibles’ within the field of production

tive national memory. Here I focus on a discussion of representations of

Every critical affirmation contains, on the one hand, a recognition of

a worthy object of legitimate discourse . . . and on the other hand, an

To our way of thinking, film is something with which you strike at

cinema screens in the star persona of Ishihara Yūjirō (1934–1987). The

Within mainstream political discourse, conceptions of shutaisei were

underpinned these filmmakers’ conceptions of ‘visual-style’ and narrative

French intellectual thought offered the Japanese educated classes alternative

Given the inappropriateness of the ‘dream-like’ quality of Hollywood’s

terms ‘with the war years of complicity and weakness, of preserving

In my case, to put it simply, it was by chance that I entered a film

of a given context and not, as with the ‘victimization’ theme, a stoic

Dispositions: ‘Self-Negation’ (Jiko hitei)

film spectator’s gaze is circumscribed by both editing and camera

Although reality is burdensome (omoku) and diverse (tayō), the camera

As a reaction against this political containment and structuring of human

In what appears to be a complex reworking of Sartre’s 1937 essay

[T]here is no I on the unreflected level. When I run after a tram, when

By these examples, Sartre is positing multiple layers of consciousness. In

Within this creative theory of ‘self-negation’, the director enters into a

there is nothing for [consciousness] to ‘be’: no essential rock bottom

Yoshida’s constant use of mirrors, glass and water, as transparent and

The concept of the auteur, as applied in marketing strategies, has become

This is a new relationship, in other words, a film is no longer a fixed

In a later conversation with Suwa Nobuhiro published in the journal Eureka

(riaritei). An image reflected on a screen does not exist as an actuality/as

My intention has been to destroy the unquestioned relationship between

Analytically, in ‘Visual Anarchy’ Yoshida was led to these theories in

Of Rossellini’s films he argues these are more detached. De Sica’s

Rome with that of Tokyo in the immediate aftermath of defeat in World

The auteur is narrating something; he could be expected to cry out in an

Yoshida talks about Rossellini’s detached style as a form of ‘discommu-

been heard so often in films that it is now devoid of meaning’ (Yoshida

is freedom’ (Sartre [1948] 1980: 34, translated by Philip Mairet). As

Young people who imitated [Ishihara] Shintarō’s hairstyle and who

Card Player 1: We’re just bored.

In particular, in Paisà and to a lesser extent Rome Open City, Yoshida

The monotheist approach of the ‘victimization theme’ of classical

Alain Resnais, Trauma and Filters of Memory

Writing about the French Nouvelle Vague Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (2008)