Chaos (カオス, Hideo Nakata, 2000)

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A down-on-his-luck handyman finds himself swept into intrigue when he agrees to a help a pretty young woman fake a kidnapping in Hideo Nakata’s noirish drama Chaos (カオス). Chaos is certainly what unfolds in the non-linear narrative as we try to piece together this fracturing tale of multiple betrayals and double crossings in which nothing and no one is quite as it seems and we can never really be sure just what game anyone is playing.

Goro (Masato Hagiwara), for instance, seems to be a bit of a sap. His ex-wife accuses him of being incapable of thinking of others, though his young son Noboru comes to him after having been bullied at school. He doesn’t seem to be very invested in his life of odd jobs which includes requests from lonely old men to play go as well as to visit the apartments of pretty women who’ve encountered some kind of plumbing disaster. Perhaps it’s no surprise he’s convinced to help Saori (Miki Nakatani) stage a kidnapping to test her husband’s affections seeing as she suspects he’s started an affair with a younger woman who is just nicer than she is, so she can’t compete.

What is surprising is that Goro turns out to be some sort of kidnapping expert. He explains to Saori that she should wear rope bindings for added authenticity when she’s released as well as refrain some taking showers. She should also not feed the tropical fish her friend asked her to, because if she’s been kidnapped then she’s not available, but then the fish will die, which means she’s sacrificing the life of living creatures just to prove a point. Though Goro treats her with tenderness, he frighteningly turns on after he’s helped her tie herself up, threatening rape. This is then revealed to be a ruse in order to get a real reaction of fear and terror for when he rings her husband Komiyama (Ken Mitsuishi) with the ransom request. 

This reversal makes clear to us that we don’t know who we’re dealing and anyone could suddenly change at a moment’s notice. We’ve just been told, for instance, that Saori tied the ropes so she could easily untie them by herself to go to the bathroom, which means that she could have done so anytime while she thought Goro was attacking her but didn’t. Obviously, she may have been too frightened to think of it, but then again perhaps she is also playing along with her own game too. When Goro extorts Koniyama’s sister, it looks like a cunning double bluff to lend authenticity to the original kidnapping plot while simultaneously pulling off a different scam, but maybe it’s also Goro going rogue and doubling his pay packet.

Despite his circumstances, however, Goro doesn’t seem to be in this for the money so much as white knighting for Saori even though he obviously knows she’s already married. On realising she may have betrayed him, Goro goes into a fairly convincing detective mode, posing as a policeman in order to investigate. He discovers that Komiyama’s mistress was a model who’d recently been cast aside by the agency because of a rumour she slept with a client while they also seem to have a repressive rule about dating. One of her colleagues says she hardly ever goes home to the flat her agency rents for her because she’s secretly living with a boyfriend. This is, perhaps, a world in which a woman can’t really be all of who she is because men are always trying to imprint their vision of idealised femininity on them. Womanhood is, after all, a kind of performance and one which Saori may be manipulating for her own ends. 

Yet it’s not clear where, if anywhere, the performances end and the authentic begins. Even having discovered at least a degree of the truth, Goro isn’t sure he can really trust Saori, while she may not really know either. What he resolves is that that might not matter, but what each of them is really looking for is a kind of escape from the constraints of their lives either through love or money only to discover that there is none, or else it lies only in death either literal or figural in a total reinvention of one’s persona. With shades of Vertigo, Nakata piles on the confusion and uncertainty to create an atmosphere of pure dread in which nothing, really, is quite as it’s assumed to be.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ghost Train (괴기열차, Tak Se-woong, 2024)

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Why are there so many stories about haunted stations? Perhaps it’s their liminal status that gives them an eerie quality. By definition, you’re not supposed to stay here. To that extent, they’re a kind of purgatorial space between one destination or another. We leave so quickly it’s like a part of us is left behind, hovering, and never able to find the exit. In any case, Gwanglim seems to have its fair share of ghost stories as investigated by “horror queen” Da-kyung (Joo Hyun-young) in an attempt to boost the fortunes of her failing YouTube channel.

She herself admits that her problem is she’s run out of content, which is why she’s badgering the stationmaster (Jeon Bae-soo) for information on this supposedly haunted spot. The funny thing is that the stationmaster seems to know a lot more than you’d expect about these cases, including their full backstories, which have nothing to do with the station or his job. You’d think that would give Da-kyung pause for thought, but she’s already drunk on the promise of a scoop and has ironically convinced the stationmaster to talk with the gift of alcohol. As she continues to listen to his stories and the ratings of her channel improve, she takes on an increasingly vampiric appearance while the stationmaster seems to become ever sicker. Nevertheless, Da-kyung only becomes thirstier for gruesome tales even as the stationmaster tries to warn her off by asking what the real reason behind her animosity to rival beauty influencer Lina (Jung Han-bit) might be.

In this, her story parallels that of a young girl on the train who is insecure in her appearance and contemplating plastic surgery only to be haunted by a woman in bandages seemingly jealous of the beauty the young girl doesn’t know she already has. Da-kyung has a crush on her boss, Woo-jin (Choi Bo-min), but thinks he prefers Lina and not just because her channel pulls in millions of viewers. Lina is a classic mean girl who endlessly puts Da-kyung down as a means of asserting her own superiority while Da-kyung secretly looks down on her for her vacuity. As her channel improves and she grows in confidence, Da-kyung sheds her dowdy outfits for something a little more stylish but is still consumed by resentment towards Woo-jin in her, it seems possibly mistaken, belief that he prefers Lina because she aligns more closely with socially defined ideas of typical femininity in her tendency to behave like a silly girl who can’t do anything for herself except look pretty around men. 

It is, as the stationmaster says, foolish to chase after what you think you’re missing and end up losing what you already had instead of learning to happy just with that. The other stories too are about overreaching greed, such as that of a homeless man who discovers a magic vending machine that disappears people and allows him to pick up their clothes and wallets to enrich himself though he never escapes the station despite his increasing desire to disappear random people until the point he realises he has consumed himself. Da-kyung is urged to delete her videos by someone who encountered something dangerous at the station, explaining that it’s built on the former site of a chapel that belonged to a cult where a mass suicide took place, further suggesting that the location itself is greedy for the souls of those who were, in a way, trying to turn away from this hyper-capitalistic vision of the world only to fall victim to it.

The stationmaster too dislikes those who profit from the misery or misfortune of others, which is what he assumes Da-kyung to be doing in her voracious appetite for ghost stories. In the very first tale, a young woman repeatedly bangs her head into a glass door, but no one attempts to help her. Everyone just moves to another carriage or generally away from her. These stories are only interesting for their gore and strangeness, no one really cares about the victims or learning from the past, which is to say we’re stuck in the station reliving the same trauma and unable to progress to a better a place. Da-kyung is stuck here most of all, and in her way, also hungry for souls lured in by lurid tales of untold horrors.

Ghost Train is released on Digital in the US on February 17 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Female Teacher: Forbidden Sex (女教師日記 禁じられた性, Hideo Nakata, 1995)

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Hideo Nakata maybe best known for his films in the horror genre, but he made his feature directorial debut for Toei’s V-Cinema with a tale of forbidden love between a besotted high school boy and his Japanese teacher. Though with a title like Female Teacher: Forbidden Sex (女教師日記 禁じられた性, Jokyoshi Nikki: Kinjirareta Sei), one might expect something fiercely erotic or sensationalist, the film is really a sensitive melodrama in which a young man who feels suffocated by his doting single mother and a female teacher who feels constrained by patriarchal social codes fall into an impossible love. 

Then again, it does have its troubling themes. Lovelorn Mitsuru (Kosuke Kawana) has been leaving mildly ominous messages on Noriko’s (Hitoe Ohtake) answerphone declaring his love and pleading with her to notice him. Noriko knows that the messages are from one of her students, but she doesn’t know which. In any case, the messages make her uncomfortable on several levels given her position as a teacher. Meanwhile, she’s in a relationship with another teacher at the school, Morimoto (Hiroyuki Okita), who is popular with female students. Noriko obviously thinks the relationship is serious as she asks Morimoto to meet her parents, but he appears reluctant in part because Noriko wants to continue her teaching career after marriage and Morimoto is presumably after more of a traditional housewife.

In fact, despite his status as an alpha male PE teacher, Morimoto is rather insecure and actively threatened by Mitsuru when he catches him having dinner with Noriko. This is right after a rumour has begun to spread around the school that he’s slept with a female student, Yumi (Asami Sawaki), who faked a story about being raped to get him to take her to a hotel where she tried to seduce him. It seems that he did not actually sleep with her, but took things father than he should have in an attempt to scare her off doing the same thing again. As such, his conduct is extremely questionable, but he is never questioned about it in the same way that Noriko is even though she only took Mitsuru for dinner even if Yumi’s friends might have a point in suggesting she’s getting back at Morimoto. She did, however, give him alcohol which is not an appropriate thing for a teacher to do, though nothing about this entire situation is really appropriate. The legal drinking age in Japan is 20 and Mitsuru could have been suspended from school just for underage drinking if his teachers found out. 

The real mystery might be why Noriko suddenly takes to Mitsuru, who was after all stalking her. But the reasoning seems to be that he’s the opposite of Morimoto. He treats her with kindness and respect and never tries to constrain her in the same way that Morimoto does even if the natural consequence of their affair is that she will lose her teaching career which had been her dream since high school. She seems to know on some level that their affair is wrong, but gets swept up in the moment and the false hope of escaping the pressures of her life such as the patriarchal expectations of marriage. While Morimoto drags his feet, her friends call inviting her to mixers and her parents try to set her up for arranged marriage meetings to hurry her along to a seemingly inevitable rite of passage. 

Mitsuru, meanwhile, feels hemmed in. He’s on track for a place at the prestigious Tokyo University and under immense pressure while resentful of his mother whom he finds overbearing though mainly just appears caring and interested in his future if a little possessive while chasing after the fugitive Mitsuru and Noriko. What he might paradoxically be looking for is an escape from adulthood, as is Noriko in a way, though his reasons for loving her are otherwise superficial and only to do with her physical beauty. Nevertheless, he resents Morimoto for his boorish, ultra-masculine attempts to dominate Noriko and thinks he’s rescuing her while unaware that in other ways he’s ruining her life. He too railroads her into staying with him, insisting that he’ll look after her by getting a job which only bears out his naivety and makes him little better than Morimoto.

Perhaps with a little male wish fulfilment, the film treats the love story as if it were pure and innocent and it’s only society that’s in the way as reflected in Noriko’s wish for time to run faster but only for Mitsuru. Nevertheless, it too acknowledges that the love is impossible because it is inappropriate given Mitsuru’s youth and Noriko’s position as his teacher, so they can only really be together in death. As such, the film ends on a melancholy note and is filled more with romantic tragedy than the purely erotic content suggested by the misleading title.

Screened as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Focus on V-Cinema.

Many Happy Returns (教祖誕生, Toshihiro Tenma, 1993)

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Cults, or “new religion” organisations as they’re euphemistically known, proliferated in Japan after the war. Though people may have joined them out of loneliness in search of new families or communities, the numbers only seemed to increase in the era of high prosperity as a sense of spiritual emptiness countered the age of consumerism. Coming in 1993 and based on Takeshi Kitano’s own novel, Many Happy Returns Toshihiro Tenma’s (教祖誕生, Kyoso Tanjo) approaches the issue with a genial humour that likely became impossible two years later with the involvement of Aum in the Tokyo subway attack.

Kazuo (Masato Hagiwara), a wandering young man, asks himself why people join join cults while insisting that all looks so fake but later becomes fascinated with them himself. He can tell that the elderly woman who can suddenly walk again after an encounter with the leader (Masami Shimojo) is probably a plant, but is intrigued rather than outraged. Shiba (Takeshi Kitano), the actual “leader” of the group, tells him that it doesn’t matter. The leader healed the lady before at some point in the past, and they’re just reenacting it to show the power of god, which doesn’t really make sense, but it seems to satisfy Kazuo for the moment. 

Of course, Shiba and Go (Ittoku Kishibe) are just a pair of yakuza types running a religious cult as a business to fleece money out of vulnerable people in the countryside by making them think their leader can make all their problems better. The only thing is, Shiba and Go seem to be the only ones who know it’s all fake while current leader has started to believe that he actually has real healing powers despite using an electricity generator to create the sparks of energy flying from his hands during his healing sessions. Though the old lady in a wheelchair is a plant, the leader sometimes agrees to heal other people who request it, which could end up backfiring if Shiba can’t find a way to fake the miracle.

After becoming alarmed that the Leader is too into his religious speeches and has fallen victim to his own patter despite obviously knowing that it’s all made up, Shiba and Go pay him to leave the cult but are then left with a dilemma over how to appoint a successor. Komamura (Koji Tamaki), who’d tried to undermine Shiba’s leadership, is a religious zealot who joined the cult to be closer to god. He objects to Shiba’s godless ways, and while Shiba briefly considers making him the leader to keep him quiet, ends up appointing Kazuo who only recently started tagging along with the cult.

Though Kazuo was originally only interested in the cult precisely because it was fake, once he becomes the leader he starts to think it’s real too. He takes his responsibilities seriously, which means of course that he threatens Shiba’s position and is torn between the real nature of cult which he knows to be a cynical way of making money by exploiting vulnerable people, and the genuine religiosity of Komamura. To look the part and boost his confidence, he starts undertaking ascetic practices such as bathing in waterfalls and going on long, isolated retreats during which he also fasts. Shiba and Go, meanwhile, stuff their faces at a local Chinese restaurant in an orgy of consumerism.

Kazuo asks Shiba if the believes in god, but Shiba counters him by asking what his idea of “god” is. Kazuo believes that “god” heals the sick and helps those in trouble, but Shiba points out that that’s never actually happened, while at least their made-up religion helped some people, so in a way it’s more godlike than actual god. In any case, Shiba’s god is probably consumerism, but unlike Go it seems he has a degree of uncertainty and entertains the possibility that some kind of god really exists and will punish him for his wrongdoing and lack of faith. When he is attacked and ends up killing someone, Kazuo tells him that it’s his punishment for denying god and chasing after money which Shiba eventually concedes to be true. Nevertheless, the closing scenes find him starting again by reuniting with the previous leader, now dressed as a catholic priest, to offer the same patter about healing miracles while warning about false cults and fake religions. Kazuo, meanwhile, has fully accepted the role of an emissary of god by kicking out Go for not taking the religion seriously while preparing to meet his own apotheosis in a sold out show attended by people who, like he once was, are spiritually lost and ironically looking for something that means more than money in this increasingly empty society.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Petals and Memories (花まんま, Tetsu Maeda, 2025)

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In many Japanese family dramas, there is an inherent sense of impending tragedy born of the notion that one family must necessarily be broken for another to be formed. Cultural sensibilities might insist that someone can only be part of one family at any time and any attempt to play a part in another is an act of betrayal. But reality is not so clean-cut and just because a woman gets married, it doesn’t really mean that she becomes a stranger to the people who raised her nor that they must completely sever ties with her even as they wish her well as she transitions to a new stage of life.

This is though what older brother Toshiki (Ryohei Suzuki) fears in Tetsu Maeda’s supernaturally tinged familial drama Petals and Memories (花まんま, Hanamanma). Adapted from a short story by Minato Shukawa, the story has an old-fashioned quality in which it could easily have been set back in the Showa era were it not for the fact that Kiyomi, the spirit that his sister Fumiko (Kasumi Arimura) claims to carry, was killed in the climatic year of 1995 which saw both the Kobe earthquake and sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. In any case, Toshiki has a distinctly Showa-era vision of masculinity and remains incredibly protective of his sister even if Fumiko has moved up in the world with her job in a university and engagement to a young professor who has the ability to converse with crows.

After their truck driver father was killed in an accident and their mother passed away in Toshiki’s teens, he’s essentially been forced into a parental position. Toshiki left school early and got a job in the factory where he still works in order to fulfil his father’s dreams of sending Fumiko to university. As such, he occasionally paints himself as a martyr and is keen to remind people how difficult it was for his mother to raise them on her own and that he’s sacrificed his future to provide for Fumiko. Her upcoming marriage is then to him a minor betrayal even if it’s also, culturally speaking, the fulfilment of his parents’ hopes for their daughter and thereby the end of his obligation.

The problem with that is Toshiki himself doesn’t have much of an identity outside of “big brother,” and is unable to see Fumiko as anything other than his little sister. When she tells him that she has memories of a previous life, he rejects them and says that he can’t bear to see his sister as “someone else”, repeatedly reasserting that she’s the daughter of his parents rather than those of Kiyomi. But Fumiko is also fiancée to Taro (Oji Suzuka) and friend to Komako (First Summer Uika). As she tries to counter him, more than anything she is simply herself which is something else Toshiki rejects in his categorisation of her only as his sister. Nevertheless, when she tells him that interacting with Kiyomi’s grieving father Mr Shigeto taught her what it was like to have a father seeing that she has no memory of her own is insensitive given that Toshiki has essentially been a father to her for most of her life. 

In clinging to his identity as a big brother, Toshiki may really be attempting to stave off his own fear of orphanhood as a man with no other family, but what he’s forced to reckon with is that his sister is “someone else” after all and not merely an extension of himself. In coming to terms with Kiyomi’s presence and extending compassion to her bereaved family rather than reacting in fear that they were trying to take his sister away from him, Toshiki begins to realise both that he didn’t actually raise Fumiko all alone but benefitted from the extended family of a community and that in her marriage his world is actually expanding rather than contracting. As the old adage goes, he’s not losing a sister so much as gaining a brother. In the “hanamanma” flower bento of the Japanese title, it becomes clear that Kiyomi’s love for her family transcended death and that she is not really lost to them even this most final parting but remains with them in spirit and memory. 

Petals and Memories screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

One Win (1승, Shin Yeon-shick, 2023)

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Wouldn’t it be nice to win just once? Eccentric chaebol son Jung-won (Park Jeong-min) waves the opportunity of victory under unsuccessful coach Woo-jin’s nose full knowing his unfortunate life of personal failures. In fact, this is why he’s hired him. Jung-won’s end goal is to engineer an underdog narrative in which the failing women’s professional volleyball team he’s just bought for a song can become a sensation led by a coach equally in need of redemption.

In Shin Yeon-shick’s One Win (1승, 1seung), the battle is against more against defeatism than anything else as Woo-jin (Song Kang-ho) and the team members first have to believe in the possibility of victory. Woo-jin is struggling to get over a sense of betrayal after his high school volleyball coach whom he idolised, Moon, who abandoned him during the quarter-finals having been offered a better job. Now he’s contemplating doing the same thing. Despite never having made much of himself either as a volleyball player, Woo-jin wasn’t keen to take this job and is convinced only by his friend’s assurances that he’ll set him up with a gig coaching the university team and this experience with a professional outfit will look good on his CV.

Then again, no one expects much of this team and even Jung-won’s ultimate goal is only for them to score one win by the end of the season. Famously faddy, a former communist rejecting his wealth and privileged scion turned spendthrift influencer, Jung-won is running the team like reality a show by constructing a narrative around them. If they get the one win, he’ll split two million dollars between the season ticket holders. This allows him to charge extortionate fees by dangling the possibility of a big payout and leveraging the drama of the team’s unlikely win. 

The problem is that the previous manager traded off most of their top players, assuming the team wouldn’t find a buyer and would have to be closed down. This has understandably created some resentment with those left behind feeling both betrayed and undervalued. There is discord among the players struggling to deal with the fallout. Intent on reclaiming past glories, the team had revolved around star player Yu-ra who had been, it seems, a mean girl bully. The other players don’t miss her even if they acknowledge they don’t otherwise have a team and now reject fellow team member Min-hee for having gone along with her abuse of them. Many of them haven’t had a real opportunity to play in years and are struggling to pick up the pace.

Woo-jin too doesn’t quite know how to use them and only later realises that he needs to change things up to make use of their true strengths and weaknesses. The first thing he does is to tell off the fan contingent who make everything worse by shouting at the team after every match to complain about their poor performance, further denting their confidence. In learning how to use new technology, Woo-jin knows that he shouldn’t just study the other teams but his own too so he can make use not only of their strengths and weaknesses , but of how their rivals will attempt to use them too. 

Nevertheless, their eventual victory can’t help but feel a little hollow given the lack of emotional investment in the players while even Woo-jin’s relationship with his sportswriter ex wife and earnest daughter is given fairly short shrift. Most of the women have some reason they’ve ended up on this “losing” team from the scary gangster player another team was only too glad to get rid of, to another recently returned from suspension, and the captain who is already 40 years old never having made the starting lineup. Their problem was, it seems, a lack of belief in themselves which Woo-jin begins to return to them while they begin to figure out how to work as a team by putting their disagreements behind them. They just need this one win to show them that they can in order to light the way to a more fulfilling future no longer defined by defeatism but a new hope for the future in which they can not only achieve their sporting goals but their purse their lives with hope and positivity.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Blue Boy Trial (ブルーボーイ事件, Kashou Iizuka, 2025)

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The police of mid-1960s Japan have a problem. They’re desperately trying to clean up the streets. But they keep running into transgender sex workers whom they can’t arrest because the working of the anti-prostitution laws explicitly targets women only, and in legal terms the people they’re picking up are regarded as male, so they have to release them. Knowing they can’t touch the women, a resentful police officer decides to go after the doctor who treated them instead.

Inspired by a real-life incident, Blue Boy Trial (ブルーボーイ事件, Blue Boy Trial) examines the social and legal repercussions of the actions taken against Dr Akagi (Takashi Yamanaka) after he was charged with supplying drugs illegally and breaking the anti-eugenics legislation by performing sterilisations while treating transgender people. Though Akagi agrees to plead guilty to the drugs charge, he refuses to move on eugenics, insisting that the surgery he performs is a legitimate medical practice that has nothing to do with any eugenicist ideology. The lawyer appointed for him, Kano (Ryo Nishikido), has an uphill battle ahead but hopes he can convince the judges by putting some of the women Akagi helped on the witness stand, to show that the treatment he gave them was medically necessary.

But part of the problem is necessarily that many of these women work in the sex industry. They aren’t respected, and their testimony won’t be either. That’s why Kano is keen to get Sachi on board seeing as she lives what the court will consider a conventional, “respectable” life like any other woman’s. Nevertheless, his request is insensitive and he appears not realise what exactly what he’s asking. If Sachi (Miyu Nakagawa) takes the stand she will be outing herself and putting the life she’s managed to build on the line. One of the other women Kano asks to testify takes her own life after being described as “mentally ill” in court and accosted by a drunk man outside it. When a picture of Sachi and her partner Akihiko (Ko Maehara) is featured in a newspaper report, she’s fired from her job in a cafe with her manager (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) accusing her of “fraud” for having responded to a job ad that clearly stated it was for “women only”.

Even Kano, to begin with, repeatedly refers to the women as “he” and uses slur words to describe them. Focussed more on winning the case, he pursues avenues that are offensive such as characterising the surgery as treatment for a mental health condition, asking why they “decided” to become women, and probing them on intimate details such as their sexual experiences as “men”.  Aside from prejudice towards the LGBTQ+ community, these attitudes also hint at the latent misogyny in the wider society which is still defined by traditional gender roles. Tokita (Junpei Yasui), the conservative prosecutor, makes a fairly nonsensical point about all the men who died in the war, accusing the women of being “selfish” and unpatriotic in giving up their manhood while panicked that transgender people threaten the very fabric of society as if he were worried that every man secretly wants to be a woman. In her emotional testimony, Sachi rejects his insistence on a socially defined gender binary and states that conforming to what he defines as a woman would also be inauthentic. What Akagi’s surgery helped her become was only her true self.

To that extent, Sachi’s partner Akihiko (Ko Maehara) is also unmanned by virtue of his disability. He too experienced prejudice and could not beat “small-town life”, much like Sachi in having been excluded by his otherness. He knows all about Sachi and has accepted her, presenting her with a ring though they cannot be legally married, but even in the big city they cannot find the freedom to live happy quiet lives. Sachi’s friend Ahko (Sexy Izumi) agreed to testify to claim the right to live well for the younger generation, so they could be free to live their lives without having to hide. The fact that Akagi is found guilty may not be surprising given the nature of the law as it was, though it did in a round about way legitimise the idea of confirmatory surgery as a legitimate medical procedure by suggesting guildelines to be followed in order for it to take place legally. Nevertheless, the first fully legal surgery did not take place until 30 years later, while those like Sachi continued to face prejudice and were forced to live their lives without the ability to be fully themselves. Even so, Sachi at least seems to have found her own happiness and fulfilment despite the social hostility that haunts her existence.

Blue Boy Trial screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2025 “Blue Boy Trial” Film Partners

A Bad Summer (悪い夏, Hideo Jojo, 2025)

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A well-meaning social worker finds himself dragged into an exploitative yakuza scam after trying to expose a colleague’s misconduct in Hideo Jojo’s adaptation of the novel by Somei Tamehito, A Bad Summer (悪い夏, Warui Natsu). Sasaki’s (Takumi Kitamura) colleagues are beginning to doubt he has what it takes for the job primarily because he is “too nice” and has trouble dealing with those who, to his superiors at least, are obviously misusing the system to claim benefits they aren’t entitled to. According to his hard-nosed colleague Miyata (Marika Ito), social welfare exists for those who find themselves “unavoidably” thrown into dire living conditions, which necessarily implies a degree of moral judgement on her part, while Sasaki is it seems keener to give people the benefit of the doubt and wants to try to help them even if it turns out they have been defrauding him.

“We must survive as bulwarks against moral decay,” Miyata intones, somewhat ironically, while pointing out that people who misuse the system make everything more difficult for “honest” clients. Sasaki later asks what exactly her morality is, but all she says is that the rules are the rules and any breach of them should be punished. The real world, however, is rarely so black and white. The truth is that it’s become too difficult to survive in this capitalistic society and a regular job alone no longer pays enough to support a single person let alone a family. 

While Sasaki falls deeper into an abyss of exploitation, a widowed single mother struggles to find a job while caring for her son that will keep them fed and a roof over their head. A woman at the factory where she eventually finds employment tells her about the welfare system, but she says she feels bad about taking other people’s money. That she later succumbs to shoplifting out of desperation suggests it was more the shame, humiliation, and stigma that kept her from applying. When she does eventually ask for help, she finds Sasaki in a downward spiral shouting at her for being an irresponsible mother and emphasising that benefits are only for those who’ve exhausted all other options, which she of course has, but is still made to feel like criminal just for reaching out. Though she is a prime example of the people they exist to help, Sasaki turns his back on her with potentially tragic consequences.

Other people had suggested to the widow that she simply remarry, laying bare to the extent to which women are still expected to remain economically dependent on men even in the 21st century. Another single mother, 22-year-old Aimi (Yumi Kawai), was convinced to apply for benefits by her friend Rika (Yumena Yanai), a bar hostess in a similar situation, but is sexually exploited by her case worker Takano (Katsuya Maiguma) who threatens to expose that she’s been working more ours than permitted meaning her benefits would stop. It’s also Rika who convinces her to get her yakuza boyfriend Ryu (Masataka Kubota) involved to sort out Takano, but he has another clever plan to use Takano as part of a popular yakuza scam in which they round up homeless people who may not know the benefits system exists and get them to apply so they can take most of their money while housing them in shelters they own. The plan is foiled when Miyata claims to have received a tip-off about Tanako exploiting his clients and enlists Sasaki to help investigate.

Sasaki seems genuinely interested in Aimi’s welfare along with that of her five-year-old daughter Misora which makes him the target of a side scam being run by Yamada (Pistol Takehara), one of his own clients who’s been fraudulently claiming on the grounds of an old back injury. The tragic thing is that Aimi, who seems to have had a disordered childhood herself, positively responds to the compassionate care offered by Sasaki who drifts into a relationship with her that is romantic and borderline inappropriate, though he is not her social worker and hasn’t done anything wrong. Aimi begins to see a more settled, ordinary life for herself which is eventually disrupted by destructive force of yakuza violence as Ryu forces Sasaki to process claims for the homeless people he’s exploiting. 

The wretchedness of his situation begins to destroy Sasaki’s integrity, which was according to Miyata their only real weapon against those who cheat the system. Unable to tell whether Aimi’s feelings for him were ever genuine, something she isn’t entirely sure of either, he sinks into a moral abyss having become all too aware of the chain of exploitation which exists in the contemporary society. The farcical, expressionist conclusion may signify that even when you fight back, nothing really changes and the only people who lose out are the most vulnerable, but there does at least seem to be a better life in sight for Aimi and Misora having escaped at least of the forces which were constraining them.

A Bad Summer screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Love Doesn’t Matter to Me (愛されなくても別に, Aya Igashi, 2025)

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Two young women find solace and solidarity in each other after escaping toxic familial environments in Aya Igashi’s adaptation of the novel by Ayano Takeda, Love Doesn’t Matter to Me (愛されなくても別に, Aisarenakutemo Betsuni). Though some might say that parents always love their children even if that love was not conveyed in the optimal way, the two women struggle with their contradictory impulses in craving the love of a parent who in other ways they know is past forgiveness.

The problem for Hiiro (Sara Minami) is that the roles have become reversed. She is effectively the parent of her irresponsible mother (Aoba Kawai) who treats her like a housekeeper and is intent on exploiting her labour. Hiiro’s mother didn’t want her to go to university and is still charging her rent and board to live at home while Hiiro works several part-time jobs to jobs to support them. She believes that her mother lives beyond her means, but is unaware of the extent to which she’s been financially abusing her by keeping both the child support her absent father had been sending and the student loan she’d taken out as a safety net. Having to work so hard also means that Hiiro is tired all the time and is prevented from taking part in normal university life or social activities which leaves her unable to make friends. At times she resents her mother so much she’s worried she might end up snapping and killing her to be free, but at the same time loves her and therefore puts up with her ill-treatment.

Enaga (Fumika Baba), meanwhile, is ostracised because her father is on the run after killing someone, though the reason she is resentful of her family is a history of sexual abuse and exploitation that have left her feeling worthless. As she later says there’s no point comparing your unhappiness to that of other people, otherwise you just end up making yourself more miserable as if you were trying to win an unhappiness competition. Nevertheless, learning of Enaga’s situation wakes Hiiro up to the possibility that other people are unhappy too and her life may not have been as comparatively bad as she felt it to be in the depths of her isolation. 

Yet what both women seem to crave is the positive maternal relationship they’ve each been denied. Hiiro gets to know another student, Kimura (Miyu Honda), who also has no friends partly owing to a judgemental attitude and poor social skills whom she later discovers to be from a wealthy background despite her being desperate to find a job and working alongside Hiiro at the convenience store. Kimura resents her mother (Shoko Ikezu) for being overly controlling and possessive. She’s come all this way to university to escape her, yet her mother calls every few hours and is angry if she doesn’t answer and makes frequent visits leaving Kimura with no freedom or social output. To Hiiro, Mrs Kimura’s actions seem to come from an obviously loving place and she might have a point that Kimura is naive, having been kept sheltered all life by her own helicopter parenting, which is why she’s been sucked into a cult. Hiiro sees in Mrs Kimura the love and affection she’d have liked from her own mother and is jealous rather than seeing how seeing Kimura feels suffocated and is driven to despair in being unable to escape her mother’s control.

Lady Cosmos (Yoko Kondo), the cult leader in whom Kimura has found salvation, tells each of the girls that they were loved by their imperfect parents and ought to love them back, but they seem to know better. Though she makes some perspicacious comments, Lady Cosmos also tells them exactly what they want to hear and attempts to occupy a more positive material space to be the loving mother they never had. But, of course, not so different from Hiiro’s mother, she’s bleeding Kimura dry by forcing her to pay extortionate amounts for readings and holy water. Ironically she’s still controlling her much like her own mother had, but Kimura thinks she’s found freedom in cult and resents any attempt to undercut Lady Cosmos’ belief system even if she’s at least on one level forcing herself to believe it rather than being a true believer. 

What might be surprising is that the two women effectively break free of the “cult” of family in accepting that their parents aren’t good for them and the decision to cut them out of their lives is valid rather than the breaking of a taboo or an unnatural rejection of the sacred bond between a mother and a child. Instead they effectively remake the image of family for themselves as one of mutual solidarity and unconditional love between two people who aren’t related by blood but have discovered a much deeper bond rooted in shared suffering.

Love Doesn’t Matter to Me screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers (アングリースクワッド 公務員と７人の詐欺師, Shinichiro Ueda, 2024)

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According to hostess bar and real estate mogul Tachibana (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), the secret to living a peaceful, ordinary life is to avoid becoming angry. Though it may not altogether be bad advice in that it’s often best to try to remain calm and reach a rational solution rather than losing one’s temper and acting impetuously, the way he says it is a veiled threat. Leave me alone, he means, and I’ll leave you alone too, otherwise neither of us will know peace again.

Shinichiro Ueda’s timely heist caper Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers (アングリースクワッド 公務員と７人の詐欺師, Angry Squad: Komuin to 7-nin no Sagishi) makes unlikely heroes of the tax man in exploring the disparities of wealth and power in the contemporary society. Middle-aged tax officer Kumazawa (Seiyo Uchino) is a man cowed by conformity. He’s been doing his job a long time and believes in cracking down on notable evaders, but has also become cynical and if, on one level, aware of the corruption that exists within the system that allows the very wealthy to overcome the rules, he’s content to keep his head down and ignore it. After all, he has responsibilities too with a family to support. He can’t afford to lose his job playing the hero. His much younger and very ambitious colleague Mochizuki (Rina Kawaei) has no such concerns and is willing to take on Tachibana without real fear of the consequences. 

Yet at the same time there’s a quiet rage that seems to be simmering in Kumazawa about the compromises he’s continuing to make. He jokingly tells a young woman how to fudge her taxes to claim an eel dinner as a business expense, but knows better than to poke the bear by looking into Tachibana’s tax affairs. When Mochizuki takes him to task, Tachibana comes for him directly by accusing him of using violence and threatening to have him fired unless he apologises and promises never to come after Tachibana again. Conscious of his own financial situation Kumazawa nods along. Mochizuki refuses and has her promotion withdrawn, though she does at least keep her job.

But the thing that really makes Kumazawa angry is that Tachibana didn’t even remember the name of his friend who took his own life after Tachibana framed him for misconduct to get rid of him. It’s this that convinces him to team up with what later seem to be ethical con people who are after Tachibana as a kind of revenge on society that is later revealed to have a personal dimension. Though Kumazawa is conflicted about the idea of committing what amounts to a crime, he accepts that it’s the only way they can ever hope to take Tachibana down. Even his old policeman friend tells him that his boss is chummy with Tachibana so they won’t go after him either suggesting this rot goes right to the top and the super wealthy essentially exist outside the law.

In a funny way, the weapon then becomes mutual solidarity and community action as this disparate group of people who each have a grudge against Tachibana come together to confiscate what he should have paid in taxes to force him to pay his fair share. The fact that his empire is built on hostess bars and is expanding into real estate suggests that his business is already exploitative while he only gets away with it because people don’t get angry enough to stop him. The authorities either take kickbacks, are being blackmailed, or enjoy being a part of his celebrity milieu so they shut down any attempts to ask questions. 

This Angry Squad are, however, prepared to play him at his own game harnessing Tachibana’s greed and vanity as weapons against him. As expected, they do so in a very humorous and intricately plotted way as the gang pool their respective strengths to pull off a major heist with a little unexpected help along the way. It turns out that you might need to take an unusual path to make even the tax office see the error of their ways, but it is after all for the fairly noble cause of reminding people that the rules should apply to everyone equally and all should be happy to contribute their fair share for a better run society.

Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)