Tag: 1970s

Mysterious Thirteen Nights: Chapter 2 – The Dish Mansion at Hell’s Bancho (怪奇十三夜 第二回 番町皿屋敷, Teruo Ishii, 1971)

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Class differences and the arbitrary codes of the samurai society come between a couple in love in Teruo Ishii’s take on the classic ghost story The Dish Mansion at Hell’s Bancho (怪奇十三夜 第二回 番町皿屋敷, Kaiki Jusan Ya Bancho Sarayashiki). Produced as part of the Mysterious Thirteen Nights TV series, this version of the tale focuses more on love across the class divide and general unfairness of the world around the lovers rather than the lord’s rashness and unforgiving cruelty.

At least, the real issue is that Hatamoto Harima has refused an offer of marriage from the influential Abe family because he is still clinging to the impossible idea of marrying Okiku, a young woman working as a maid at the estate. As she says, the class difference between them is too great. No matter how much Harima may say that they are the same and all that matters is that they love each other, he is not actually free to make this decision. Even if he wanted to go so far as to renounce his samurai status, his family would likely not allow it and use any means possible to stop him, including murder.

What they do instead is frame Okiku for breaking one of a set of precious plates gifted to the family by Ieyasu after the battle of Sekigahara. Okiku counts the plates as instructed, only to realise that there is one missing. Two of the other servants say she broke it, though Okiku swears she has no knowledge of whatever happened to the plate. Harima is shaken, believing the testimony of the two servants who were particularly close to him, yet thinking that Okiku has done this deliberately as a means of reducing the status of the Aoyama family and thereby dissolving the class difference between them so they can be together.

He does not seem to mind this kind of manipulation and even appears grateful that Okiku has forced his hand, planning to give up his status to be with her. When his scheming retainer Jinnai, however, tells him that it was all a trick Okiku has played to test his affections because she doesn’t really trust him, Harima loses his temper at this apparent act of betrayal. Despite saying that, at the end of the day, it’s a just plate and he’s not the sort of person who would let someone die over it, Harima ends up killing Okiku in a fit of range. Her body falls into the nearby well where she is said to have broken the plate. 

The fact is that this is a plot put in motion to force Harima into accepting the proposal from Abe for the good of the clan who fear refusing him will only ensure his rage. Okiku had become an obstacle to Harima’s marriage in drawing him away from his duty to the clan in favour of his personal feelings, so they removed her by trying to split the couple up. As a member of the samurai society, Harima is actually less than fishmonger’s sister to decide his romantic destiny. Even Okiku’s brother Iwakichi extends a degree of understanding to Harima on learning that he has killed his sister after telling him that Okiku meant to leave the castle because she too thought he would be happier with Abe’s daughter and no longer wished to stand in his way. Iwakichi understands that it was the samurai world that wielded the sword that killed Okiku, telling Harima only that he should live in Okiku’s memory as this is doubtless what she would have wanted.

Harima, however, goes on a rampage avenging her death, killing off most of the retainers that betrayed him, though he is not driven “mad” by Okiku’s vengeful spirit as in many similar films but makes a righteous decision to attack the corrupt samurai society. Even so, the film ends in a climatic sword fight taking place during a thunderstorm in which Okiku’s ghost appears among the men Harima is trying to kill. Ishii’s use of slow motion and surreal imagery such as the plates bleeding as Harima destroys them further add to a sense of supernatural dread, The conclusion then takes on a poetic quality as Okiku and Harima become a pair of butterflies, suggesting that their love was only possible outside of the human world free from the barriers of social class. That this classless society has not quite come about suggests that the film is also talking to a contemporary audience facing similar issues during the era of high prosperity while leaning in to a tragic tale of frustrated romance rather than condemning the hero’s rashness or the inherent cruelty of samurai society outside of its obsession with status.

The Fang in the Hole (穴の牙, Seijun Suzuki, 1979)

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After killing a suspect in a shootout at a bar, a policeman finds himself haunted by the dead man’s vengeful spirit in Seijun Suzuki’s made for TV noir Fang in the Hole (穴の牙, Ana no Kiba), adapted from a story by Takao Tsuchiya and scripted by Atsushi Yamatoya who also wrote Branded to Kill. Undergoing a process of transformation, a once earnest cop slowly takes on the persona of the man he killed while driven out of his mind by his ironic transgression.

Shida (Yoshio Harada) is a sleazy yakuza wanted for killing his boss. With his face splashed across the papers, he takes refuge in a bar with an old girlfriend, but for whatever reason she declines his requests stay with him. In any case, the bar’s owner (Yasuyo Matsumura) contacts police detective Togura (Makoto Fujita), also a regular of the bar, who arrives to arrest Shida. Shida, however, draws a gun on Togura who shoots him in the head leading him to become impaled on a nearby stained glass window, spraying blood all over har hostess Miyuki (Junko Inagawa).

There may be a central irony in the idea of a policeman shooting a suspect, not least because it makes him the same as Shida. It’s this kind of transgression that hangs over Togura as he struggles to deal with the aftermath of having killed a man and is haunted by Shida’s vengeful spirit. Suzuki bathes the entire film in an eerie green that lends it a supernatural air, as if Togura had entered a slightly different world as he falls deeper into this barbed hole that leads all the way to hell. He slowly seems to take on some of Shida’s characteristics, becoming fixated on Miyuki and later being caught with a series of erotic photos that make him seem sleazy and exploitative. Both Miyuki and the bar owner paint him as a dirty cop and sex pest misusing his authority to intimidate and exploit.

Yet to begin with, Togura had seemed to be an ordinary family man, reminding Miyuki that he doesn’t want to do anything to jeopardise his career and pension. He calls his wife from the bar and lies that he’s working late so likely won’t be home, but perhaps there’s something in Togura that also resents his ordered life and is looking for an escape from conventionality. The more he tries to beat Shida’s curse, the deeper he falls into the trap that’s been set for him only to exclaim that he’s climbed out of Shida’s hole at the very moment of his downfall.

Togura’s transformation is completed when he considers taking the missing money from a case he’s been investigating rather than reporting its whereabouts having already been kicked out of the police force. Losing the cigarette lighter with his name engraved on it that had been given to him by sympathetic colleagues is symbolic of a less literal kind of lost identity. He comes to believe that it fell into the hole with the bodies of the dead criminals and that he will now be implicated in their deaths. The conclusion, however, hints at cosmic irony as the film’s title takes on a new meaning in the presence of a neighbour’s magpie dog.

Nevertheless, whether the haunting is real or a manifestation Togura’s guilt and suppressed desires, Suzuki’s eerie ghost effects take on a theatrical quality as the kuroko open the shoji behind Togura to expose a hellish space resembling a dank basement with water pouring from above while Shida’s ghost towers over a defeated Togura foreshadowing his eventual fate. The fact that the police never found the bullet that killed Shida which is said to have rattled around his brain and then exited from the same hole it entered by suggests that in reality it was always heading straight back at Togura. Surreal and haunting, Suzuki’s noirish tale has a stickiness about it as Togura sinks deeper into madness and discovers that he cannot, in fact, climb out of the pit of his moral transgressions.

Heaven Sent (神様のくれた赤ん坊, Yoichi Maeda, 1979)

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A young couple facing a relationship crisis due to differing views about a potential pregnancy find their connection further strained when a stranger arrives with a little boy who may be the man’s biological son in Yoichi Maeda’s lighthearted road trip dramedy, Heaven Sent (神様のくれた赤ん坊, Kamisama no Kureta Akanbo). A remake of the 1957 film Shukin Ryoko directed by Noboru Nakamura, the film explores both the changing social dynamics of the era of high prosperity and a lack of resolution with the post-war past as the heroine searches for the lost hometown of her early childhood along with the realities of her late mother’s life that had remained unknown to her.

In an arrangement that was still a little unusual in the late 1970s, Sayoko (Kaori Momoi) and Shinsaku (Tsunehiko Watase) are a cohabiting couple who are not legally married. Sayoko is an aspiring actress, while Shinsaku has a part-time job as part of a cheer squad for public events as he tries to kickstart a career as a manga artist. A mini crisis has presented itself in the fact that Sayoko thinks she may be pregnant and wants to have the baby while Shinsaku very much does not, largely it seems because he is immature and irresponsible so does not want to be burdened with the expense and labour of caring for a child. All of which adds to the irony when a woman arrives at their door with a small boy, Shinichi, explaining that his mother has abandoned him to go abroad with another man leaving instructions that he should be delivered to his father who might be any one of the five men she has listed on her goodbye note. Shinsaku is only one who lives in Tokyo, so the woman has decided to leave the boy with him and have done with it.

There is something quite sad about the fact that no one really wants this little boy while seemingly trying to avoid the reality that he ultimately end up going into care if no one accepts responsibility for him. All of these men admit they slept with his mother, Akemi, who was a bar hostess, and therefore theoretically could have fathered her child, but all reject any sense of obligation or that the fact of their sleeping with her could have any kind of consequences. All of them seem to have reasons why now would be a particularly bad time for an illegitimate child to surface from being in the middle of a political election campaign to the news being broken on the day of their wedding to another woman. The soon to be married man even makes a series of misogynistic excuses within earshot of Shinichi to the effect that “no one would take a woman like that seriously,” and that as Akemi slept with pretty much everyone there’s no way to know if the child his. 

These misogynistic views are reflected in Sayoko’s simultaneous quest to rediscover her childhood hometown as she chases a memory she has of a shining pagoda, only to be told that her mother worked in a place called “Ono Castle” which turns out to have been a brothel. This is presumably how her mother saved the money to open the hair salon Sayoko grew up in and the reason that they moved away from that first hometown so that her mother could move on to a new life having escaped the stigma of being a former sex worker. Finding this out has quite a profound effect on Sayoko, not that she disapproves or is ashamed but comes to a new appreciation of her mother’s suffering that she knew nothing of before. While Shinsaku considers hiring a sex worker, the couple having temporarily broken up, Sayoko too is propositioned as a sex worker and ends up having a very strange experience with a young man desperate to lose his virginity. 

For much of the journey as they take Shinichi to visit each of his prospective fathers, the couple are on parallel paths only later coming together again when Shinsaku gives in and says Sayoko should have the baby even though by that point she has discovered is not pregnant after all. Part of the reason she wanted the baby was that her career had not been going well and a part of her wanted to try the traditional route of finding fulfilment within the domestic space as a wife and mother, reflecting the way these attitudes are still current, though Shinsaku is not in a position to support a wife and child financially and shows no signs of being willing to take on the responsibility of being the sole bread winner. Sayoko does, however, suggest she would rather leave him and raise the baby alone if he objects so strongly. Her mother made it work, after all, and the Japanese economy is at least in a much better place even if women’s rights have not improved all that much.  

Despite physically resembling the child and sharing some of the same mannerisms along with left-handedness (which he tries to correct), Shinsaku too rejects the idea of his paternity and is desperate to push the responsibility onto someone else while simultaneously extorting “child support” hush money from the potential fathers. Demonstrating once again how women are expected to deal with men’s irresponsibility, the last potential father has passed away and his widow has already adopted several children whom he may have fathered with other women. Yet as they travel together, the pair being to bond with Shinichi and go off the idea of parting with him, experiencing a moment of growing up themselves in envisioning a different kind of future and coming to a mutual decision about the idea of expanding their family.

The Youth Killer (青春の殺人者, Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1976)

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An angry young man railing against “family imperialism” eventually kills both parents in a moment of intense frustration, abandons his girlfriend, and ends up alone, but what he discovers maybe less the freedom he was seeking than only more loneliness and despair. Adapted from a story by Kenji Nakagami that was itself inspired by a real-life case of patricide, Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s The Youth Killer (青春の殺人者, Seishun no Satsujinha) is imbued with the nihilistic sense of powerlessness that coloured the 1970s as its Hamlet-like hero tries to free himself from an oppressive social system only to find it indifferent to his existence.

Part of Jun’s (Yutaka Mizutani) problem is a protected adolescence as evidenced in the opening scenes in which he and his girlfriend Keiko (Mieko Harada) run round playfully reciting nursery rhymes. The irony may be that his name means “pure”, and that he is too thin-skinned to survive in this overly complex world. His father (Ryohei Uchida) stopped him from going to university like many of his friends, preventing him from moving on into a more settled adulthood. He did this, he says, because of the student protests not out of fear that harm would come to him but fear that he would cause it. The farmland surrounding Jun’s parents has been earmarked for Narita airport and despite angry clashes between local farmers and an uneasy alliance with student protesters, will eventually go ahead. Those like Jun are being squeezed off of their land and have nowhere else to turn.

Perhaps sensing his listlessness, Jun’s father gives him the money to open a bar and capitalise ion the new custom from the airport, but this too leaves Jun feeling childish and emasculated, as if it’s his father who will actually be in charge. The two men hug and wrestle, alternately showing affection and tussling for power. His secondary problem is that his parents apparently don’t approve of his girlfriend Keiko with whom he is running the bar. His father has hired a private detective who tells him that Keiko was raped by her mother’s lover resulting in her mother hitting her and causing her to lose the hearing in one ear. Jun’s father does not believe that Keiko was raped and insists that it was Keiko who seduced her mother’s lover.

It seems to have been this fracture point that caused Jun to snap and kill his father, less because of his attachment to Keiko than because of the challenge to his masculinity implied by the suggestion that his girlfriend simply sleeps with anyone she pleases. In fact, Jun doesn’t seem to particularly like Keiko and is wary of committing to relationships owing to his fear of “family imperialism”. He becomes fixated on the question of her deafness, niggled by the possibility she lied about its cause and his father is right. Never examining why Keiko might choose to create a different truth around what happened to her, he in fact tries to rape her himself and is obsessed with tying to find out whether not there was a fig tree near their old home as Keiko says or an azalea as others would have it.

The conflict he has with Keiko is not so different from that with his mother who, on learning of her husband’s death, quickly shifts to protecting her son, but then seizes on it as a chance to claim her own freedom. Sick of the drudgery of working at the family’s auto repair shop, she suggests running away with Jun to start a new life in a new place just the two of them. Her language becomes increasingly romantic before she eventually asks Jun to make love to her. When he eventually kills her, she tells him to stick it in and be gentle as if she were talking to a lover. But she too also doubts him, fearing he means to take the money from the safe and escape alone. Not even maternal love can overcome this kind of cynicism in a society ruled by money.

Hasegawa frames Jun’s progress as a series of confrontations, between his father, his mother, Keiko, and eventually himself in which he discovers he is still a child. He has killed his parents, but has failed to become a man. Sitting on a beach with Keiko he is overwhelmed by loneliness remembering a happy family moment when his father sold ice lollies rather than toiling at the garage. Scenes in his student film contain imagery echoing self-immolations and this is what he eventually tries to do himself in setting the bar on fire with him inside it only to be rescued by Keiko. After fleeing the scene he stows away on a truck and removes the bandage from his hand symbolising the transgression of his parents’ murder, but he is quite literally being driven to a destination not of this own choosing. Rather than freedom in solitude, he’s discovered only loneliness and despair. Condemned to a limbo state, he has nowhere to go and can only travel in circles looking for an elusive exit from this very particular kind of hell.

The Youth Killer screened as part of Japan Society New York’s Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Anarchic Ethos.

Retreat Through the Wet Wasteland (濡れた荒野を走れ, Yukihiro Sawada, 1973)

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Despite its lurid title which contains the classic signifier “wet”, Yukihiro Sawada’s Retreat through the Wet Wasteland (濡れた荒野を走れ, Nureta koya wo hashire) is more sleazy nihilistic drama than classic Roman Porno. Though it obeys many of the genre’s rules, the placement of its erotic scenes feels less formulaic and the film as a whole less about eroticism than abject despair in the wake of Asama-Sanso in a Japan that has become an authoritarian paradise ruled by bruiser cops driven fragile by egos and greed.

The central mystery is, for some at least, whether fugitive cop Nakamura (Hirokazu Inoue) is really “mad” or merely using the mask of mental illness to protect himself from his former colleagues who want him dead because he knows too much. The truth may be, however, that Nakamura has wilfully retreated inside his mind as a means of escape from a world of constant corruption. Or else, that his desire for the world to be better is in itself a mental illness that’s seen him institutionalised and tortured with shock treatment in an effort to cure him of his problematic humanitarianism. In any case, he has lost all his memory and knows himself only as “Number 19” having been robbed of selfhood and individuality. All of which might suggest that he isn’t as much of a threat to his colleagues as they seem to believe him to be, though the question is why exactly they fear him so much when it’s clear that they face no consequences for their actions.

The film opens with a gang of thugs raiding a church where the pastor has been collecting money to help villages in Vietnam rebuild after the war. The thugs beat the pastor and rape his daughter who is captured in a beatific pose with a crucifix on her chest as choral music plays. When the pastor calls the police, we see the policemen receive the call while one is busy stuffing the tracksuits the thugs were wearing into the boot. They are assigned to investigate the crime they have just committed while it appears that their superiors at the station are all well aware of these kinds of activities are taking place and are even encouraging of them. The police is now the biggest gang and anyone not a part of the corruption cannot tolerated in this system because it’s underpinned by an idea of mutually assured destruction. 

Nakamura appears to have been a more idealistic officer and though it is not clear whether he participated in the corruption himself, evidently opposed it at least philosophically, which is what has destroyed his mind. He was once Harada’s (Takeo Chii) mentor, cautioning against his desire to become stronger as becoming strong and powerful only makes you an oppressor which is not, evidently, what he considers the proper role for a policeman. To an extent, the film frames Harada as the hero as perhaps he would be in a certain kind of crime thriller. He’s effortlessly cool in his sunshades with a cigarette hanging from his lip, but he’s also a broken loser hollow on the inside and nothing without the authority granted to him by being a member of the police force. When he and Kato (Akira Takahashi) visit a sex worker, she complains that Harada can’t get it up as if signalling his essentially powerlessness and implying his violence is rooted in fear and insecurity.

Haunted by what seems to be flashbacks to an Anpo protest, Nakamura is apparently a counter to these authoritarian instincts. Having escaped the psychiatric hospital, he’s accompanied by a young woman who seems to be something of an outsider herself and the film’s real moral compass. She feels sorry for Nakamura and sees his inner purity, while in turning to Harada at the film’s conclusion and exclaiming that she pities him too reasserts her power over him. It’s she who takes Nakamura to her cousin’s travelling theatre troupe wandering the “wasteland” outside of the cities and thereby wilfully existing outside of mainstream society. Nevertheless, they are at first invaded by Harada and his partner Kato who have brought along Nakamura’s wife, and then by rightwing bikers who destroy their camp. Even these small enclaves cannot be permitted to exist and no attempt to escape the system can be tolerated. Sawada expresses this oppressiveness though the overuse of censorship bars many of which are not hiding anything that might be considered objectionable but are, in a certain sense, merely decorative. In Harada’s final demonic grin as he retreats across the wasteland, the film seems to suggest that there is no other way to escape this world of corruption other than madness or death.

Retreat Through the Wet Wasteland screened as part of Japan Society New York’s Kazuhiko Hasegawa’s Anarchic Ethos.

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

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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)

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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.

The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Ha Gil-jong, 1972)

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Park Chung-hee kept a tight rein on cinema which he saw as an important political tool and means of communication. That’s not to say, however, that criticising his authoritarian regime was impossible, but that criticism was often expressed in unexpected or abstract ways. The debut film of Hollywood-trained director Ha Gil-jong, The Pollen of Flowers (화분, Hwabun), was adapted from a novel by Yi Hyoseok that was published in 1939 when Korea was under Japanese rule but now speaks directly to the contemporary era as a young man and woman long for escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the “Blue House”.

The Blue House is the name for the residence of Korea’s president and where Park Chung-hee lived at the time, but within the context of the film, it’s inhabited by the mistress of a wealthy businessman, Se-ran (Choi Ji-hee), and her younger sister, Mi-ran (Yoon So-ra). The relationship between the sisters is, however, much more like mother and daughter with Se-ran repeatedly stating that Mi-ran is “everything” to her and that she must grow up to become a “great woman”. The slightly uncomfortable implication is that she is encouraging a possible relationship between Mi-ran and her patron Hyeon-ma (Namkoong Won) or at least that by “great woman” she means Mi-ran should be the partner of a great man who moves within their social circles. Ominously, however, the film opens with Mi-ran discovering that all the fish in their pond have died making it clear that the water here is poisoned and the atmosphere rancid. 

It’s not exactly clear how old Mi-ran is intended to be, only that Se-ran had been worried that hadn’t yet started menstruating. She’s spent her entire life in the cosseted environment of the Blue House and knows nothing of the world outside. That she gets her period for the first time when her father brings his secretary/secret lover Dan-ju (Hah Myung-joong) to the house suggests that she has, in a sense, been liberated by his arrival. For whatever reason, Se-ran had tried to warn her off him. She appears jealous while implying that Dan-ju is a dangerous social climber who threatens the integrity of her household. Mi-ran replies that you shouldn’t judge someone because of their background, but in a fit of pique also refers to Dan-ju as a “servant” which hurts both his feelings and his male pride.

But Dan-ju himself is something of a cypher whose motivations are often unclear. Having grown up working class, he’s risen in the world through complicity with Hyeon-ma’s authoritarian rule. As Se-ran says, Hyeon-ma is infatuated with him but perhaps more as a symbol of his overall control. He reminds Dan-ju that he controls his future and repeatedly asks him if he wants to go back to his old life of being a “scumbag” not quite realising that Dan-ju may have become fed up with his degradation and no longer thinks this kind of success is worth it. Hyeon-ma refers to Dan-ju as his “dream and ambition,” even going so far as to say he’d like to start a new life with him, though this is obviously not something that would be considered publicly acceptable in the Korea of the early 1970s. The film is often referred to as the first to depict a same-sex relationship, but it’s one motivated more by power than by love. It’s not clear if Hyeon-ma is so convinced that Mi-ran is completely safe with Dan-ju because he believes him to be interested only in men, or if he is certain that his control over him is absolute, while Dan-ju may not actually be interested in men at all and is only submitting himself to Hyeon-ma’s attentions in return for social advancement.

What he comes to represent for each is freedom. After running away, Mi-ran explains that she was happy with her life within the Blue House, in other words under authoritarianism, because it treated her well and so she could think of no other happiness. But meeting Dan-ju has shown her that happiness is possible outside of it. Love is a force that threatens the social order, and now Mi-ran resents her tightly controlled life and longs for the freedom Dan-ju represents over the patriarchal oppression represented by Hyeon-ma to which Se-ran has wholly submitted herself. Now that she’s committed to the regime, she cannot permit Mi-ran to leave it and tries to convince her to study music abroad and date an international pianist who could help career. Hyeon-ma, meanwhile, reacts in jealousy and frustration. He beats Dan-ju and throws him in his shed echoing the torture and imprisonment of dissidents that took place under Park’s regime. 

As time passes, however, something evidently goes wrong with Hyeon-ma’s business causing him to flee in a hurry abandoning Se-ran and Mi-ran to their fates. The ominous maid who has been dropping rats through their windows, eventually tries to release Dan-ju with whom she has some kind of intimate connection, with the consequence that he haunts the mansion like a ghost. Mi-ran appears to have reassimilated, dancing with another man while wearing what looks very like wedding a dress, but her desire for freedom is reawakened by Dan-ju’s return. The house itself is then stormed by the revolutionary force of Hyeon-ma’s creditors who are not exactly noble avengers. They raid the place looting his possessions to get back what they’re owned, even going so far as to cut off Se-ran’s finger to take her ring and pulling out her gold teeth. The message seems to be that the dictator will probably get away (Park didn’t, he was assassinated by the head of his own security forces), but a heavy price will be paid for complicity when the regime falls, as all regimes eventually do. 

The Fixer (日本の黒幕, Yasuo Furuhata, 1979)

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Japan was rocked by scandal in 1976 when it came to light that American aviation firm Lockheed had paid the office of then Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka three million dollars funnelled through right-wing fixer Yoshio Kodama to ensure that Japanese airlines such as ANA purchased Lockheed Lockheed L-1011 TriStar passenger jets rather than the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. The disturbing revelations deepened a sense of mistrust in the government which was shown to be inherently corrupt and in constant collusion with nationalist activists and yakuza.

This might be why the figure of the political mastermind hangs heavy over the Japanese paranoia cinema of the 1970s. The Fixer (日本の黒幕 Nihon no Fixer), however, rather ironically began as a vehicle for director Nagisa Oshima. At that time, Toei was struggling as its run of jitsuroku movies began to run out of steam. Producer Goro Kusakabe wanted to make a film about Kodama, who’d been alluded to in the Japanese Godfather series, and thought that getting Oshima to do it would take Toei in a new artistic direction, moving them away from the studio model by bringing in outside auteurist talent. But the problem with that was that an artist like Oshima did not want to work with a typical studio production model and, at the end of the day, what Toei wanted was a commercial film. It also has to be said that as a studio Toei tended to lean towards the right, and the film that was finally produced, directed by action drama specialist Yasuo Furuhata using a script by Koji Takada which Oshima had described as “boring”, was much more sympathetic towards its subject than Oshima would likely have been.

Like the Japanese Godfather, series it’s essentially a Greek tragedy retold as yakuza movie in which Kodama is brought low by a series of betrayals that prevent him realising his dream of an ideal Japan, which in effect means undoing democracy to restore the pre-war militarist regime. The true source of the corruption is then shifted to the prime minister, Hirayama (Ryunosuke Kaneda), a stand-in for Tanaka, who is brought to power by Yamaoka (Shin Saburi), a thinly veiled Kodama, but later betrays him for a shot at a political comeback following a bribery scandal during which Yamaoka is left out to dry. Yamaoka casts himself as the true patriot, and Hirayama as the greedy opportunist who only cares about his own wealth and status. 

Yamaoka’s vision of himself is eventually undercut by a former ally who accuses him of being deluded by his own lust for power, placing a pistol on the table in front of him and suggesting he do the honourable thing. Yamaoka, however, does not want to do that and gives a last speech to his young men explaining that silence is his way of fighting back and that he’ll be vindicated in the end, which he eventually is when Hirayama is arrested. The drama is played out in part by the internal conflict within a young man with a bad leg who first tries to assassinate Yamaoka but is taken in by him and trained up as a potential successor only to be manipulated by his daughter who hands him the dagger Hirayama had returned to Yamaoka when he betrayed him and asks whether he wants to kill a woman or the “real villain”, by which she means Yamaoka but the boy has a different target in mind.

On the other hand, Yamaoka is exposed as having some very weird and cult-like ideas such as breeding a child that has his completely purified blood in his veins by encouraging a relationship between his legitimate daughter and a young man he brought back from China she has no idea is her half-brother born to a Chinese woman Yamaoka murdered to escape Manchuria. Brief mentions are made of Yamaoka’s Manchurian exploits though painted in a more heroic fashion that Kodama’s reality, as in a late speech about how “terrorism” has lost its meaning as some of the young men joining Yamaoka’s militia meditate on his pre-war activities in which he belonged to an organisation that assassinated politicians who advocated for peaceful coexistence with Korea and China. 

That the young assassin, Ikko (Tsutomu Kariba), eventually decides to knife Hirayama as the “real” villain, suggests that the youth of Japan has chosen Yamaoka rather than simply being sick of the political corruption he in effect represents even as others quickly, and perhaps uncritically, leap to his defence buying his claims of having been targeted due to “internal infighting”. While those around him are driven towards their deaths, Yamaoka survives muttering that it’s all for Japan even while finding himself cut loose as rival yakuza factions vie over territory and political influence. Lighting candles at his altar, it’s almost as if these men are human sacrifices designed to bring about his vision of a “better” Japan and chillingly it seems he has no shortage of willing victims.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Angel Guts: Nami (天使のはらわた　名美, Noboru Tanaka, 1979)

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Aspiring journalist Nami Tsuchiya (Eri Kanuma) works for a magazine called “The Woman,” but it soon becomes clear she’s their only female reporter and one of a handful of women in an office otherwise staffed by men. Her editor has her writing a series titled “Rape and its Consequences” in which she attempts to interview women who’ve experienced sexual assault in an attempt to root out the effect it’s had on their lives. At times Nami seems a little conflicted, puffing away on a cigarette with a pensive look on her face, but there’s no denying that she’s sold out other women for a chance to make it in a man’s world by exploiting a suffering she does not herself share.

Muraki (Takeo Chii), formerly a top magazine editor, reminds her that not everyone who reads her magazine is a woman, but there is something perverse about the idea of her article which is otherwise conceived from a perspective that seems very male. The female readership of this magazine would not need to be educated about the prevalence of rape nor its consequences. Nami’s article doesn’t seem to want to find success stories, but to revel in misery. She accosts one of the women she’s hoping to interview and tries to badger her into talking on the record. Yoshiko appears fed up and tells her that recounting what happened would be like being raped all over again, but still Nami doesn’t relent. She tries to guilt her into speaking by suggesting that her testimony would stop other women being assaulted, which is backwards logic seeing as it isn’t the women who are responsible and even if she were advancing a victim blaming narrative that it’s on women to protect themselves, Yoshiko had not done anything that could be seen to be “wrong” nor is there any way she could have prevented what happened to her.

Through her articles, Nami has become complicit in this culture and is effectively an agent of rape herself in her desire to tear into the lives these women have tried to build for themselves and extract even more salacious detail. She describes Yoshiko as “happily married,” but she’s living in a rundown house on the margins of the city. It seems her husband maybe ill and therefore unable to work. Yoshiko may have married him out of a lack of other options and it’s not clear if her husband knows about her past or how he would react if he learned of it now. The fact that Nami’s attempt to interview others about Yoshiko fails bears out the social stigma that can surround those who’ve experienced sexual assault and suggests that Yoshiko has now become an outcast. The photos that they publish only black out Yoshiko’s eyes making it easy for those in her community to identify her which could certainly make her life much more difficult and lead to a loss of employment or social further exclusion.

It’s clear that Nami hasn’t really thought any of this through and is only focussed on impressing her male editors to be given better assignments. This may in part be what she means when she says that she’s been assaulted in her office by the people she works with on gaining more of an insight into the consequences of her writing. Though he threatens to rape her himself, Muraki seems to be a representative of a more compassionate masculinity but at the same time has been emasculated, rendered impotent after his own wife was raped by an intruder and then left him because he couldn’t satisfy her sexually. He connects Nami with a mentally disturbed nurse who was assaulted by a doctor with an autopsy fetish, though the incident was covered up by the hospital. None of these men, except Muraki, is held responsible for their actions. Nami, however, becomes all of these women, envisioning herself abandoned at the scene half-naked and clothes torn, discarded on the rubbish tip of the modern society. At the beginning of the film, a woman smashes the lens of the camera as a man moves towards her, as if she meant to rebuke us for watching, while even Nami finds herself becoming dangerously aroused by watching other women being assaulted or listening to their stories before she too cracks and begins to see herself as nothing more than an anonymous object at the mercy of male society.

Angel Guts: Nami is available as part of The Angel Guts Collection released on blu-ray 23rd February courtesy of Third Window Films.