Category: Japan

A New Love in Tokyo (愛の新世界, Banmei Takahashi, 1994)

Posted on by

Life is theatre in Banmei Takahashi’s A New Love in Tokyo (愛の新世界, Ai no Shinsekai). Strangely marketed in some quarters as a kind of sequel to Ryu Murakami’s Tokyo Decadence though it is entirely unconnected to it, Banmei Takahashi’s after hours drama is a breezy riot that runs in direct contrast to other post-Bubble era movies which saw only despair and disillusionment in economic stagnation. For Rei (Sawa Suzuki) and Ayumi (Reiko Kataoka), however, life is one long party that they live on their own terms hoping to ride the wave all the way to the sea.

That said, it’s true that Rei, at least, is doing her dominatrix job because it’s impossible to support oneself as an artist in this economy. She is, in fact, basically subsidising her whole theatre troupe through sex work as a means of keeping it going. Her relationship to the men in the group is almost like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves while, for unexplained reasons, she sleeps with each of her dopey castmates on a rota system. It’s not until crunch time that they realise they should probably get jobs too, while the only other woman in the group (Yoko Nakajima) takes a job as a receptionist answering the phone at the call girl agency where Ayumi works.

Rei often runs into Ayumi leaving hotels and the pair soon become fast friends, though unlike Rei, Ayumi is a regular sex worker who sleeps with her clients. Nevertheless, Rei seems to like her precisely because, as she puts it, she’s a good liar, which is perhaps what you need to be to be successful at this business. She manipulates her clients by pretending to be a shy virgin so they pay her more for basic services, while lying to her boyfriend that she’s an office lady. The fact he takes it at face value suggests he might not be all that bright, which is why he’s struggling to finish his exams to become a doctor. Later, she’s thrown him over for a lad training to be a lawyer but just with as much success. Both the men she ends up with seem to be feckless and dim, though she fluffs their egos by pretending to be stupid. She says that her end goal is to become the wife of a professional lawyer or doctor, which is to say she’s looking for class status and respectability, though she’s probably earning more than they are by herself already. Ayumi has a host of savings pots and sometimes transfers large sums of money into one telling her boyfriend it’s from her father to help pay for a wedding.

Which is to say, everyone here is playing a kind of role. Both Rei and Ayumi seem to be using their real names for their work, but as Rei says the dominatrix gig is good for her acting career in allowing her to take on multiple personas. She too writes frequent letters home to her mother which bear little relation to reality in which she claims to be a therapist’s receptionist. But the clients are acting too, because this is, after all, all about role play. One of Rei’s most devoted customers is a yakuza who bosses his men around all day then comes to her to be punished. He is scrupulously polite and really rather sweet, buying up all the tickets to Rei’s play to make sure she’s not embarrassed on the opening night. Generally speaking, the streams shouldn’t cross between Rei the actress and Rei the dominatrix, so the yakuza is crossing a line by intruding on her personal life at the play, though he does so in an otherwise respectful way, apologising for his presence and making it clear that he doesn’t mean to expose her to those who might not know nor does he intend to encroach any further on her personal life.

Another of the women’s clients seems to be a fed up salaryman ranting about his boss and company lay-offs, hinting at the stressfulness of the economic situation for those working outside of the sex industry as well as the emasculating nature of corporate life in which the salaryman can only vent his frustrations through BDSM role-play rather than by actually taking it up with his boss. Rei and Ayumi are, by contrast, free from any such concerns. That is not to say, however, that their lives are easy or without danger. When a sex worker is found dead in a love hotel bathroom, a gloom falls over the industry. Rei asks Ayumi if she’s feeling alright, but as it turns out her agency has spotted a business opportunity seeing as most of the others will have decided to close for the sake for safety and as a gesture of respect. Ayumi too is threatened by a customer with a knife and is only saved by the arrival of a yakuza, in an unexpected cameo from ice cool V-Cinema star Show Aikawa, who intimidates the customer into backing off by eating his own sunglasses. Nevertheless, Ayumi goes straight back to work to meet the next customer, unwilling to let herself be cowed by male violence.

That’s something she has in common with Rei who similarly treats the attempts of men to ruin her night with similar disdain. When one customer proves rebellious, she keeps him waiting for hours while tied up and bound in the dark. She and Ayumi try turning the tables by visiting a host club, but are instantly put off by their poor quality patter. They go on a kind of date with two guys who tried to pick them up, but dump them when they’ve had enough. Rei, in particular, has several boyfriends who think they have some sort of claim on her body and her time, but she only ever does as she pleases. There’s something unexpectedly joyful about the two women running hand in hand through the midnight city, as if this were only ever their playground. The juxtaposition of the erotic photographs taken of actress Sawa Suzuki by Nobuyoshi Araki and those of her childhood hint at this quality of playfulness, as if her life were one of fun games in which she’s never quite grown up. They also remind us, however, of her ordinariness. She had a childhood too, and is, in fact, just like everyone else. Her job is just a job, no different from those of the guys at her theatre troupe who work in restaurants and video stores. She and Ayumi even exchange business cards. This festival might be over now, but that only means it’s time to start preparing for the next in the company of her friends as she and Ayumi enjoy their lives in the permanent dawn of a city that seems to exist only for them.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kokkuri (こっくりさん, Takahisa Zeze, 1997)

Posted on by

The tensions between a trio of young women are brought to the fore by an ill-advised consultation with Kokkuri-san in Takahisa Zeze’s atmospheric horror movie. Some more than others, these girls are all haunted if only by adolescent confusion and suppressed desire. Looking for answers with no one turn to in the absence of parental authority, they rely doubly on a late-night radio show, Midnight Blue Bird,  hosted by a girl their age calling herself “Michiru”.

“Michiru” is the heroine of the Japanese version of Blue Bird fairytale about a brother and sister who leave in search of the blue bird of happiness only to return and realise that it was waiting for them at home all along. While the moral of the fairytale might be that happiness is all around us if only you know how to look, there is precious little surrounding the girls outside of their friendship which is already beginning to fracture under the weight of adolescence, not to mention a series of overlapping love triangles.

What neither of the other girls know, is that Michiru is actually a persona constructed by Mio (Ayumi Yamatsu) who is actually the host of the radio show. As Michiru she claims to be sexually experienced and rebellious, answering the questions that come from other young women though, in reality, a regular high schooler and romantically naive. As we gradually become aware, she is in love with her friend Hiroko (Hiroko Shimada), but Hiroko has a crush on Masami’s fickle boyfriend Akira. It was Mio who suggested the Kokkuri-san game on her radio show, a Ouija board style means of divination, but it quickly turns dark with Masami (Moe Ishikawa) manipulating the board to needle Hiroko after realising she’s after her boyfriend.

The resulting fallout pushes Hiroko and Mio towards a confrontation with their shared traumas as survivors of a drowning. Hiroko is haunted by a little girl in red, ironically named “Midori” which means “green”, and struggles to get over the guilt she feels over a childhood friend who drowned in a public bath. Mio, meanwhile, gives contradictory biographical information on her show, but it seems that Mio’s mother intended to take her own life with Mio in tow after she caught her with her new husband to be following the death of Mio’s father. Echoing the central motivation of the film, Mio’s mother suggests the “go together” to where her father is, but later saves Mio alone.

But while Hiroko becomes preoccupied with the notion of sex, vowing to become more like Michiru, she tells Michiro that thanks losing her virginity will change her though she later laments that it’s changed nothing at all. Mio, meanwhile seems to have a hangup having caught her mother with another man. In disgust, she rubs at her libs in the same way that the older Mio later does after finally finding the courage to kiss Hiroko who lips have, by then, been coated in striking red lipstick. The colour red seems to represent the curse of Kokkuri-san and with it repressed guilt, regret, and forbidden desire. Though it seems that by learning to accept herself, publicly unmasking herself on her radio show and confessing her love for Hiroko live on air, Mio alone is able to overcome the curse. The kiss she gives Hiroko is one of life that seems to break the spell and free them both from Kokkuri-san’s trap, though all may not be as it first seems. 

Nevertheless, the fact that Hiroko does not remember makes this something of a private evolution for Mio even as voices from the past resurface and encourage them “go together” toward whatever fate awaits them in the film’s ambiguous conclusion that echoes that of Zeze’s earlier pink tale of frustrated same-sex desire, Angel of September, which shares many of the same themes. Even so, in finally accepting her sister, who is impressed and supportive of her coming out live on air even if she cynically adds it can be her new gimmick, Mio has undergone a transformation into adulthood and symbolically been reborn, emerging from the cleansing waters with greater clarity and self-assurance if perhaps no more certain of what the future may hold.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Angel in September (本番レズ　恥ずかしい体位, Takahisa Zeze, 1994)

Posted on by

According to Hitomi, she and Eriko were once lovers in a past life in which they were angels battling a demon army. She claims that she recognised Eriko at once, though never had the courage to talk to her at school and has only connected with her now after witnessing her transgressive act of stealing a lipstick from a convenience store. Aside from bristling slightly that in her past life she was apparently a man, Eriko goes along with Hitomi’s bizarre story until their relationship intensifies and it begins to annoy her. 

It’s not really clear if Hitomi actually believes what she’s saying or is making the whole thing up. It may be a way for her to try and articulate her feelings, framing the love she feels for Eriko as a cosmically fated romance that began with an apparently heterosexual union, though perhaps after all angels have no gender. On the other hand, perhaps these demons that they’re battling represent those who would stand in the way of their love. Though it’s plain that Hitomi looks at her with an obvious longing, she asks Eriko if it’s alright that she’s not a boy. When Eriko replies that it doesn’t matter, Hitomi sadly asks if anyone would do while doubting her own worthiness. Eriko laughs and kisses her again, maintaining dominance by assuring Hitomi that she will teach her as she gently removes her clothes. 

But it’s also clear that Eriko has other things going on and, in some ways, represents the demon to Hitomi’s angel. She messes around with men via the telephone club, essentially a hookup line, getting Hitomi to come with her as they go on a date with a middle-aged man they plan to extort. After she and Hitomi run away together, she sleeps with the truck driver they hitched a lift with in the next room as if deliberately torturing Hitomi who writhes in agony while being subjected to her moans. Unable to bear the torment she calls her mother and asks to be picked up. Which causes a rift between herself and Eriko in what Eriko sees as an act of betrayal. After dropping out of school, Eriko takes up with another girl and rejects Hitomi’s pleas to come back, telling her that she doesn’t want to be railroaded onto a conventional life of marriage and children that believes is all that school leads to. Hitomi may, in that sense, be more conventional. Her innocence is reflected in the fact that she’d never drunk alcohol and disliked it when Eriko made her try. She dresses in a subdued manner and is fearful of Eriko’s reckless behaviour.

Nevertheless, she too tries on Eriko’s persona by going on an awkward arcade date with a boy from the telephone club who takes her to a hotel where she sleeps with him, but evidently loathes the experience and tries to regain control of the situation by becoming violent and demanding money. Resenting Eriko’s assertion that she couldn’t be an angel because she doesn’t have a scar, Hitomi burns herself by heating a metal fork to mimic the Orion’s Belt motif of moles Eriko has on her breast. Despite accusing Hitomi of only caring about herself, it seems that Eriko too is using the fantasy as an excuse to reject emotional intimacy. The other girl she’s with accuses her of thinking of Hitomi while they make they love with which she appears to be unsatisfied and there is something in her that seems fearful of genuine connection.

When they finally reunite, the final time they make love mirrors the first with roles reversed as Hitomi gently removes Eriko’s shirt and Eriko reaches out to touch the brand on Hitomi’s breast in shyness and wonder. The Orion’s Belt motif echoes the cosmic nature of their connection, as if they had finally completed their journey home to each other. But the ominous undertones remain as Hitomi returns to her story in which she romantically sacrificed herself for Eriko by jumping into the water to quell the demons’ storm. In releasing the apparently resurrected goldfish that she flushed away in pettiness and anger, she lets herself go as, like the butterfly lovers, she and Eriko seem to be transformed into fish free to swim in the ocean. Delicately shot with the yellow hues of nostalgia, Zeze’s poetic tale of toxic, frustrated love ends on a melancholy note that suggests the lovers are bound only for a loop of eternal heartbreak in every possible reincarnation.

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (赤い橋の下のぬるい水, Shohei Imamura, 2001)

Posted on by

According to the blue-tent philosopher, the real meaning of freedom lies in thinking for oneself and coming to your own conclusions. People today are too educated to admit their desires, he says. That’s certainly true of Sasano (Koji Yakusho), the embodiment of the contemporary salaryman and one who has now been cast adrift in the wake of economic stagnation. He later asks if an officer worker doesn’t have the right to love, and in his present state he might not because it’s made him a stranger to himself who can no longer make his own decisions or identify what he really wants out of life.

That might be the reason that the late Taro (Kazuo Kitamura) decided to send him on a wild goose chase to the Noto Peninsula where he once hid a Buddhist statue he stole from a Kyoto temple in a pot which shoved at the back of a cupboard in the house of a woman he once loved. As we later learn, Taro became a drifter after the war and ended up living with a woman now known only as “Granny” (Mitsuko Baisho) before he unfortunately killed someone and went to prison. After that, he was too ashamed to return, but it seems like Granny spent the rest of her life waiting, sitting by the little red bridge that leads to her home.

The bridge itself comes to represent a path to freedom as Sasano becomes involved with a younger woman who lives there, Saeko (Misa Shimizu) . After witnessing her seemingly wet herself while stealing cheese at the supermarket, Sasano uses an earring she lost as an excuse to enter the house and unexpectedly ends up having sex with her which causes Saeko to gush large amounts of water on orgasm. This is apparently Saeko’s affliction and to her a source of shame that’s ruined relationships and isolated her from society. Every time she has too much water inside her, or in other words, when her libido can no longer be denied, she feels the urge to exorcise it in other transgressive ways such as shoplifting. To that extent, female sexual desire is framed as something seen as taboo, but Saeko’s sexual fulfilment turns out to be good for the world around her. It’s why the trumpet flowers bloom so beautifully outside the house, and when the water flows into the river it beckons the fish in from further out to sea. Saeko doesn’t connect the two things, but it’s also, of course, why she has access to high-quality water that enables her to make delicious traditional-style sweets.

Sasano, meanwhile, begins to discover another side of himself while living in this small town. His wife often calls to nag him to transfer money, and to begin with we might assume that they’re already divorced but the truth is that they’ve been forced to live separately because of Sasano’s economic situation. Though she’s taken their son and moved back in with her parents, Sasano’s wife tells him to hurry up and get another job or else they’ll never get back to Tokyo. Nevertheless, just as he does, she may be discovering a new and happier life outside of the city. When she calls to say she wants a divorce, she tells him that their son has made a lot of new friends and he doesn’t want to move back. It seemed that what she wanted was the salaryman ideal and she resented Sasano for falling from the corporate ladder, but it turns out that there are other ways to be happy. As Taro had put it, corporate culture doesn’t want workers to think. It wants busy drones who complete tasks mindlessly to pay off their mortgages and be accepted as fully-fledged members of society.

By breaking out of the salaryman straightjacket, Sasano begins to find unexpected fulfilment in a simpler life as a fisherman. Through his reconciliation with Saeko and acceptance of the emotional dimension of their relationship rather than the purely sexual, he discovers a kind of serenity as evidenced by the rainbow that emerges above them as Saeko orgasms directly into the sea. Life is about small pleasures, the film seems to say, such as good food and sexual fulfilment, that can also improve the general environment quite literally watering the earth with human warmth.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ichijo’s Wet Lust (一条さゆり　濡れた欲情, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1972)

Posted on by

The opening text at the beginning of Tatsumo Kumashiro’s Ichijo’s Wet Lust (一条さゆり　濡れた欲情, Ichijo Sayuri Nureta Yokujo) informs us that though the film might be inspired by the life of Sayuri Ichijo, queen of the strippers, it is fiction. Truth be told, Sayuri Ichijo isn’t in it all that much, but her presence seems calculated given the fact that Ichijo had also been having frequent troubles with the censors over her erotic cabaret appearances. Her signature set piece involved passing around a magnifying glass so that audience members could inspect her vagina, which got her charged with obscenity. 

Shortly before the film’s release, Nikkatsu had shifted production almost entirely to its Roman Porno line of erotic dramas. In 1972, a charge of obscenity was levelled at them in relation to the film Love Hunter, after which they became embroiled in a lengthy series of legal battles which continued until 1978. Kumashiro was the screenwriter for Love Hunter, though he penned it under a pseudonym. He apparently reached out to Ichijo as a gesture of solidarity and she agreed to be in the film, though she’d previously turned down an offer from Toei, because she thought the script seemed promising and was persuaded by Kumashiro. The dig at Toei appears to be mirrored in the film as Ichijo performs a routine dressed as a samurai noblewoman dancing to the theme from Red Peony Gambler, while her other acts mix a music hall sensibility with transgressive eroticism such as candle play.

In the wake off her legal troubles, Sayuri has quit the business to open a sushi restaurant while struggling to shake off her past. An obnoxious customer seems surprised about the idea of a stripper eating ramen, only for Sayuri to remind him that they’re normal people too and eat normal food like everyone else. She may be the queen of the strippers, but Sayuri still occupies a kind underclass in the regular world in which she’s looked down upon for her erotic art even if she personally regards it empowering. Even so, the slightly younger Harumi (Hiroko Isayama) seems to want to knock her off her perch and alternates between fawning admiration and resentment.

Trying to curry favour, she tells Sayuri that she identifies with her backstory of being an orphan that they may have grown up in the same children’s home in Saitama despite her broad Osaka accent. She also tells her husband, recently released from prison after being convicted of murder, that her father was sentenced to death, though this appears to be another detail pinched from Sayuri’s biography, which may not be true in her case either. Harumi later admits that nothing she’s said about herself is actually true, which could also be a lie, as she otherwise seems intent on stealing Sayuri’s identity and with it the top spot at the club. After getting arrested and fined, she tells her friend that she’s quitting their lesbian floorshow show because, she insensitively says, the lesbian stuff’s just for talentless hacks and she’s apparently turned off by other women’s genitalia.

To try to take down Sayuri, Harumi uses sex to manipulate the men around her including her besotted husband and another man he stabbed in the leg. Scenes of Sayuri’s show are intercut with Harumi having sex on a rollercoaster while a female attendant tries very hard not to laugh and another woman looks up in confusion from the ground. Harumi seems to be making a show of her life in a different way at least to Sayuri who is courting controversy and may have sensationalised aspects of her biography to give herself a sob story but otherwise affects refinement, every inch the queen holding court when questioned by reporters about her legal troubles and retirement. Nevertheless, she too may be threatened by Harumi, point blank telling her not to make trouble at her last show and or steal her candle act when she leaves. Sayuri’s acts become more extreme as a consequence which is what gets her in trouble with the censors, while Harumi tries to perfect a weird gimmick of squirting milk out of her vagina. Even so, she goes about it with reckless abandon and a sense of fun that lends the film a breezy, down to earth sensibility that itself is, in fact, a rebuke to the censor and a defiant depiction of a young woman living a life without constraints. 

Lovers Are Wet (恋人たちは濡れた, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973)

Posted on by

Everyone keeps asking Katsu (Toru Ohe) if he’s Katsu, but he continues to deny it. No matter how insistent those around him are that this is his hometown, Katsu refuses to acknowledge it while claiming no other identity. It is in a way, the ultimate negation of the self and the town to him is a kind of liminal space in which he’s only ever waiting for something or else putting off the act of leaving as if prevented from moving on.

This sense of listless rootlessness may reflect that of a youth generation orphaned after the collapse of the counter-culture movement. Katsu sings bawdy folk songs in the manner of a protest singer with nothing to protest. Yoshie (Moeko Ezawa), the wife of the owner of the cinema where Katsu is working, asks him if he’s a member of the far-left movement on the run from the authorities, but Katsu says he’s not smart enough for something like that, though later admitting that he does seem to be on the run from something. 

Though she’s curious about his past, Yoshie doesn’t seem to question him about being Katsu and rather appears to want him to be an embodiment of her projected desires. She is too is trapped in this place, pinned behind the box office window with only a cat for company. Her husband rarely comes home and spends all his time with a mistress. He knows that Katsu is sleeping with his wife, but couldn’t care less. Or rather, he’s sort of grateful because it’s one less thing for him worry about. Yoshie, meanwhile, clings to him because Katsu is her only means of escape from this moribund existence. She pleads with him to stay and to love her, but Katsu doesn’t seem to be capable of love and is only sticking around for the occasional tryst. 

Catching sight of another couple having sex in the wild, he stops to peep and gets into a fist fight with the man, Mitsuo (Rebun Hori), after which they become awkward friends. Mitsuo sets him up with another girl despite Katsu’s insistence that he’s not hard up for them, but Katsu immediately tries to rape her as if asserting his primal masculinity. Ironically enough, he rides around with the banner for Sex Animal on his bike as a means of advertising and Yoko (Rie Nakagawa), the girl, later remarks that he’s reenacting the poster in his attempt to rape Sachiko (Chizuyu Azami). A sex animal seems to be what he’s become as he purses meaningless and impulsive sex that care little for the woman’s feelings, only about dominance and conquest. Sachiko later brings Katsu’s mother as if to remind him of his true identity but her rejects her, while the girl later gets the upper hand by telling both the men to get lost and no matter how much they might think they’ve won, they really haven’t.

As Katsu rapes Sachiko, Yoko and Mitsuo share ironic banter in voiceover offering a running commentary while doing nothing to help Sachiko. They too seem bored and listless, which might be why Yoko seems drawn to Katsu even if in him she perhaps sees a shadow of death which would be another way of leaving this town. He later tells her that he killed someone for money, offering the money as proof, though it’s a fairly meaningless gesture as is the money itself which doesn’t seem to have increased his possibilities. Probably, he doesn’t know what to do with it. He describes Yoshie’s warmth as like a womb, and is apparently in this town waiting either for death or to be reborn, though Yoshie’s own failed suicide attempt seems to suggest there is no real escape from this purgatorial existence. When he tells her he wants to go somewhere else, Yoshie tells him that it’s the same everywhere anyway, so leaving will make no difference and there is nowhere he can go. 

The increasingly prosperous Japan of the mid-1970s in which the student movement has died seems to have no place for him. Kumashiro kicks back against this sense of ennui partly through his ironic use of censorship which cannot help but suggest what it hides. The large black bars and scratched out pools of white hint at an attempt to erase and oppress sexuality, which is the means by which Katsu and fails to find freedom, just as they oppress freedom of expression. Katsu meanwhile continues to block things out, rejecting his identity and behaving like a character from a film more hollow archetype than man just as Yoko seems to be an embodiment of his projected desires. She too may have only one destination available to her in this inescapable cycle of unfulfilled longing and crushing ennui.

Warrior of the Wind (風の武士, Tai Kato, 1964)

Posted on by

Mysterious forces swirl around a hidden village deep in the mountains said to contain copious amounts of gold in Tai Kato’s adaptation of the Ryotaro Shiba novel, Warrior of the Wind (風の武士, Kaze no Bushi). Though billed as a ninja movie (the film’s poster prominently features jidaigeki star Hashizo Okawa in ninja wraps with a shuriken in his hand), the film is really more of a historical romance in which a feckless young man finds new purpose through a love that is destined to remain unfulfilled.

Shinzo’s (Hashizo Okawa) main problem is that he is a second son and at the tail end of the Edo era, which means he has no real prospects in life. As the film opens, he is still in bed in the afternoon when he has to be woken by his indulgent older sister who nevertheless needles him about his complicated love life. A bit of a Don Juan, Shinzo has been romancing a young woman from a local inn, Osei (Naoko Kubo), but has also fallen for the daughter of a dojo master, Ochino (Hiroko Sakuramachi). In order to woo her, he’s got a part-time job as an instructor and faces rivalry both personal and professional with his colleague, Koriki (Minoru Oki), who is also interested in Ochino though she appears not to like him. 

Later, Osei describes their relationship as being more of a friends with benefits situation, though it’s clear that she is really in love with Shinzo but doubts that he takes it as seriously as she does. The implication is that she feels this romance to be impossible because of the class difference between them. Shinzo’s romantic interest in her may be precisely because he is only a second son, but even so he likely will not marry her because she is not noblewoman. Conversely, Ochino doubts Shinzo’s sincerity when he makes overtures to her knowing that he is technically still in a relationship with Osei and is unsure whether or not she can trust him despite her obvious attraction. This element of romantic confusion adds to the pervasive sense of mistrust that colours the late-Edo society in which it is impossible to tell whose side anyone is really on when even individuals struggle to define their own authentic identity. Rounding out the chaos, Shinzo is also pursued by a woman working with mysterious shogunate agent The Cat, who says she no longer knows who she is anymore and asks Shinzo to make love to her in the aim of finding out.

Shinzo too is given a mission on behalf of the shogun. As his brother says, this ought to be what finally gives his life purpose. The way to serve a lord is to carry one’s orders, as Shinzo is old after asking too many questions. But conversely, it seems to be that he finds purpose more in saving Ochino and the eventual mutual recognition of their feelings than he does in fulfilling his purpose as a samurai lord. It turns out that both the shogunate and the Kishu clan want to take over the village because it was said to have amassed vast amounts of gold, which, aside from the desire to possess it themselves, makes them a threat to the shogunate in the event they are gathering funds for a rebellion. The village is only thought to have 200 residents, though they are believed to be remnants of the once-powerful Heike clan who fled into the mountains.

Ochino’s “true identity” is then that of a Heike princess, but she again sets her authentic identity through love in making the decision to give herself bodily to Shinzo and take no other husband despite knowing she must return alone to the hidden Brigadoon-style village and thereby identifying herself as “Shinzo’s wife”. Koriki had attempted to make her his wife in nature through rape, which she seems to have escaped, despite Koriki’s taunting Shinzo with claims that he has already “made her a woman”. In her resistance, Ochino has asserted her own right to autonomy while otherwise assuming her position as leader of the clan, which has also now defeated the threat of invasion and conquest.

Bloodier and more visceral than some of Kato’s other jidaigeki adventures, the film is surprisingly gory in places with bloodspurts hitting the camera and blood trailing from flying shuriken. The violence of the action scenes is conveyed through frenetic editing and the use of POV-style closeups from the perception of the aggressor that often see the victim reeling from a blow seemingly delivered by the camera itself or else staring in horror. Visions of oddly positioned corpses add the sense of absurdity in this internecine world of intrigue and mystery where, it seems, love is the only truth but even so must itself then be denied in order to preserve the precarious order of the bakumatsu society.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Two Seasons, Two Strangers (旅と日々, Sho Miyake, 2025)

Posted on by

A young woman in flight from the city asks what if you could go on a journey and never return, start again in another place pretending to be someone else or perhaps truly be reborn? Her suggestion may hint a desire to escape oneself in travel, as if it were possible to leave unpleasant things behind and become an idealised version of oneself somewhere where no one knows you. Inspired by two manga stories by Yoshiharu Tsuge, Sho Miyake’s Two Seasons, Two Strangers (旅と日々, Tabi to Hibi), isn’t really so concerned with whether that is actually possible, but with the idea of travel as a means of liberation as the writer heroine struggles to free herself from “a cage of words” and somehow move beyond language.

Li (Shim Eun-kyung) writes in her native Korean which takes on a poetic quality at odds with the way she expresses herself verbally in Japanese which tends to be plainer, though warm and curious despite her outward shyness. She opens her screenplay with a woman waking up in a car “at a dead end” which is where she may feel herself be, though her isolation is echoed at a scene at a beach in which an Italian photography student tries to get a reserved Japanese man (Mansaku Takada) to pose naturally, taking off his sunglasses as if in an attempt to unmask him. He obviously can’t understand anything she’s saying, though the woman doesn’t seem bothered by it, and soon leaves the beach feeling uncomfortable to have been looked at in this way without much in the way of reciprocity.

A returned gaze might be what he finds in Nagisa (Yumi Kawai), a young woman on an impromptu island holiday trying to get away from something in the city. A professor at a screening of Li’s film describes it as sensual and erotic, which seems to confuse Li and perhaps hints at the ways he sees himself in it rather than what might have been intended. Another student, meanwhile, is moved by its depiction of loneliness and the impossibility of communication. Though set in the summer on a southern island, the scene is shot in blues that express the melancholy of the young couple who share a poignant connection that’s destined to end in sadness as Nagisa will soon return home. The final scene, set amid a typhoon, then becomes desperate and ominous despite its seeming serenity as Nagisa urges Natsuo to swim out further in the hope seeing fish with the suggestion that she is pushing him toward his death.

Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi), a gruff old man Li ends up staying with on an impromptu trip of her own only this time to snow country, echoing the famous novel as her train leaves the tunnel into a snowy landscape, says that he measures a piece of art on how well it depicts human sadness, which is something Li perhaps tried to do with her screenplay even if she says that her thoughts on seeing the film were that she has no talent. She tries to come up with something more organic inspired by the surroundings at Benzo’s mountain lodge, only to feel guilty and that perhaps she’s intruded on a private sorrow he may not actually have wanted to share despite suggesting she base her screenplay on her stay in an attempt to drum up business. Nevertheless, she strikes up an odd friendship with him and tagging along on his mission to steal a carp from a pond that turns out to belong to his ex-wife’s family as a kind of petty revenge.

Like Nagisa, she too will soon be moving on, to a new place to discover more of herself. While others make meta comments about the nature of drama, it may be that through the gift of a camera Li learns to look outward and gains an excuse for travel that takes her away from the introspection of her writing. As Natsuo had said, too much time to think can make you depressed, and though the stories she writes are sad rather than scary, as Nagisa had described Natsuo’s grim anecdote, they have an underlying darkness and sense of despair. Nevertheless, while the idyllic beachside setting of the summer segment may seem unusually chilly, Miyake finds warmth in snowy vistas of northern Japan which are, in their own way, a kind of blank canvas or a story waiting to be written by a traveller in search connection with oneself and the world.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers opens at New York’s Metrograph on April 24 with a limited nationwide rollout to follow.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Diamond Diplomacy (Yuriko Gamo Romer, 2025)

Posted on by

Perhaps it’s strange to think of a sport as a national pastime, given that many transcend borders with global networks and shared histories that span centuries. Yet American-born sports are largely played only in America and perhaps it’s the relatively small scale of their most successful export, baseball, that makes it such a rich source of cultural exchange. There might therefore be a mild contradiction that both the US and Japan think of baseball as a national game as if it could belong only to one, though they don’t so much tussle for the soul of the sport as bounce it back and forth in a continual process of exchange. 

Yuriko Gamo Romer’s documentary Diamond Diplomacy explores the way in which baseball has fostered a relationship between the two nations that has survived severe strain. As a historian points out, baseball predates judo in Japan and became a symbol of its modernisation during the Meiji era. As soon as they began to play, Japan was beating the Americans at their own game as teams of schoolboys triumphed over elite squads from local warships leaving the sailors with a degree of wounded pride to have lost at a game they created. 

A video montage likens the equipment worn by the catcher to that worn by kendo players with its chest armour and grilled visor, while other interviewees wonder if it doesn’t play into a cultural mindset in which the individual sublimates themselves into a collective and commits themselves to a higher goal as a member of a team. Others describe it as Japan’s first purely recreational sport and suggest that it adopted samurai traits and martial arts philosophy which gave it a seriousness and a rigour that was at odds with the way the game was played in the US. American players who later came to play in Japan report consternation with the training regime, explaining that in general they only practised for a couple of hours before hitting the golf course while Japanese players trained 10 hours a day. This intensity may have contributed to the team spirit, but also, according to some, reflects a fundamental difference in cultural philosophies, While American players believe one is born with talent and can sharpen it only to a certain extent, in Japan they believe that it’s hard work that produces results and the more you train the better you can get regardless of innate talent.

Nevertheless, according the documentary, Japanese baseball fans continue to look up to the American leagues and it was the process of bringing over top stars such as Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig during the 1930s that fostered a sense of connection between the two nations. These sporting relationships became a way of staving off conflict and brokering peace, though endured even once war had broken out. Internees in America describe finding hope and purpose in self-built diamonds, while the resurgence of baseball also contributed to the post-war recovery and a restored sense of national pride. In America, however, Japanese players were prevented from joining the major leagues and faced discrimination until Mashi Murakami was signed to play in the US in the mid-1960s. No other Japanese players were allowed to go play in America until Hideo Nomo exploited a loophole by retiring to accept a transfer only to be viewed as a traitor in Japan.

Nevertheless, the nation soon came round and Nomo’s games were later broadcast live on television making him a national hero. The film positions Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani as the inheritors of this legacy, continuing the cross-cultural interplay between the two nations into the present day. An interviewee charts changing attitudes to the US and finds a correlation between the presence of Japanese players in America, suggesting that they fell to their lowest in the post-war period during the economic conflicts of the 1980s in which the US feared the newly dominant force of Japan in the bubble era, but improving with the arrival of Japanese players in US leagues in the lost decade of the ‘90s. Baseball continues to be a more isolated sport than some with each nation mainly focussed on their domestic game with no formal infrastructure for international competition outside of special organised matches, but perhaps that’s what makes this unique relationship possible in the push and pull of cross-cultural interaction through the shared love of sport.

Diamond Diplomacy screens 25th April as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer (English subtitles)

BAKA’s Identity (愚か者の身分, Koto Nagata, 2025)

Posted on by

What does a name really mean? Can you really start over just by swapping your current identity for a new one, and what would that actually mean for the rest of your new life? Two young men who’ve been failed by adults and authority figures become involved with yahoo boy-style cyber crime, only in this case the aim of their romance fraud is to trap men they already know are poor and desperate and convince them they can turn their lives around by lending their identities to “someone in trouble”. 

It’ll only be for two years, they say. Just lie low, try not attract attention from the authorities. Though the targets also get a new identity in the form of a driving license with another name, they’re told not to use it for driving because the police will run checks on it if they have an accident. But the truth is that despite the widespread believe that it’s easy to disappear in Japan, it’s actually quite hard to live without a formal proof of identity through the family register system. You can’t rent an apartment or get a regular job, because on paper you don’t exist. The fake ID they’ve been given is only good enough to pass as proof of age. It’s not going to stand up if someone actually does more than glance at it.

But even if the idea of being able to wipe everything clean and start again might be attractive, the reality it not quite so easy. You can’t just wipe away your existing fears and traumas, and they’ll follow you even into your new life. Takuya (Takumi Kitamura), who’s been doing this sort of thing longer, is conflicted on realising their latest mark, Egawa (Yuma Yamoto), is a broken man who can’t get over the death of his daughter at the hands of his wife. Though Takuya, and the young woman they have assisting them with the scam, don’t want to do something like this to someone who’s already suffered so much, this world is pretty brutal and in reality they no longer have much choice.

Kisara (Mizuki Yamashita) is only involved in the scam because her mother stole her scholarship fund and she needed money for university, but she’s since dropped out and seems to be doing this kind of thing full-time. Takuya too seemingly had no parental support and sold his own identity to pay for medical treatment he hoped would save his brother, but he died anyway. That might be why he feels so protective of Mamoru (Yuta Hayashi), a young man he met in a homeless shelter run by the yakuza for the purpose of getting them to apply for benefits and then stealing them all. Mamoru was also abandoned by his mother and suffered physical abuse in his familial environment. Takuya brings Mamoru in on the scam and his life in the criminal underworld thinking it would help him, only to later feel guilty when events spiral out of control.

Takuya may look to his boss, Sato (Goichi Mine), as a kind of big brother figure, but also knows that he most likely plans to throw him under the bus while plotting to rob gangland kingpin Joji (Kazuya Tanabe) of a windfall gained through gold smuggling. Various people warn Takuya that it’s best to get out now, because if you go too deep you never will, but Takuya knows his bid for escape is likely to fail even when he turns to former mentor Kajitani who convinced him to sell his identity in the first place. The irony is that Takuya sold his name without a second thought and doesn’t really think his identity’s worth anything, which might be why he thought it was worth rolling the dice just to see if he could change his situation. The film’s Japanese title might ask us who we thought was being “fooled,” the men whom Takuya scammed who convinced to give up their identities for what seemed to them at the time a lot of money, or Takuya and Mamoru deluded both by the opportunities of a life of crime and by the allure of escape. In the all end, all any of them really have is each other and the unexpectedly genuine connections that arise between them in opposition to a society that has already discarded them and a hellish underworld in which an identity is just another commodity to be bought, sold, or sacrificed at will.

Trailer (no subtitles)