Tag: Daigo Kusano

Dead Angle (白昼の死角, Toru Murakawa, 1979)

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The jitsuroku yakuza movie which had become dominant in the mid-70s had often told of the rise and fall of the petty street gangster from the chaos of the immediate post-war era to the economically comfortable present day. The jitsuroku films didn’t attempt to glamourise organised crime and often presented their heroes as men born of their times who had been changed by their wartime experiences and were ultimately unable to adjust themselves to life in the new post-war society. Adapted from a serialised novel by Akimitsu Takagi which ran from 1959 to 1960, Toru Murakawa’s Dead Angle (白昼の死角, Hakuchu no Shikaku) by contrast speaks directly to the contemporary era in following a narcissistic conman who has no need to live a life of crime but as he says does evil things for evil reasons. 

Prior to the film’s opening in 1949, the hero Tsuruoka (Isao Natsuyagi) had been a law student at a prestigious Tokyo university where he nevertheless became involved in the Sun Club, a student financial organisation launched by mastermind Sumida (Shin Kishida) who eventually commits suicide by self-immolation when the organisation collapses after being accused of black market trading. An unrepentant Tsuruoka resolves to start again, rebuilding in the ashes as a means of kicking back against hypocritical social institutions and rising corporate power by utilising his legal knowledge to run a series of cons through the use of promissory notes to prove that the law is not justice but power. 

In this Tsuruoka has an ironic point. He doesn’t pretend what he’s doing is legal, only that he’s safeguarded himself against prosecution. When a pair of yakuza thugs break into his office and threaten him in retaliation for a con he ran on a shipping company, he reminds them that as they’ve had him open the safe it would make the charge of killing him robbery plus murder which means automatic life imprisonment rather than the few years they might get for simply killing him without taking any money. He always has some reason why the law can’t touch him, while implicitly placing the blame on his victims who were often too greedy or desperate to read the small print and therefore deserve whatever’s coming to them. In at least one case, Tsuruoka’s victimless crimes end up resulting in death with one old man whom he’d double conned, pretending to give him the money he was owed but getting him drunk and talking him into “re-investing” the money with him, takes his own life by seppuku in the depths of his shame not only in the humiliation of having been swindled but losing his company, who had trusted him, so much money. 

You could never call Tsuruoka’s rebellion an anti-capitalist act, but it is perhaps this sense of corporate tribalism symbolised by the old man’s extremely feudalistic gesture that Tsuruoka is targeting. As his wife Takako (Mitsuko Oka) tells him, Tsuruoka should have no problem making an honest living. After all he graduated in law from a top university, it’s not as if he wouldn’t have been financially comfortable and it doesn’t seem that the money is his primary motive. While Takako continues to insist that he’s a good person who wouldn’t do anything “illegal”, his longterm geisha mistress Ayaka (Yoko Shimada) knows that he’s an evil man who does evil things for evil’s sake and that’s what she likes about him. Elderly businessmen are always harping on about the “irresponsible youth” of the day but all are too quick to fall for Tsuruoka’s patter while he is essentially nothing more than a narcissist who gets off on a sense of superiority laughing at the law, the police, and the corporate landscape while constantly outsmarting them. 

In this, the film seems to be talking to the untapped capitalism of the 1970s. Like Tsuruoka, the nation now has no need to get its hands dirty and should know when enough is enough but is in danger of losing sight of conventional morality in the relentless consumerist dash of the economic miracle. That might explain why unlike the jitsuroku gangster pictures, Murakawa scores the film mainly with an anachronistic contemporary soundtrack along with the ironic use of saloon music in the bar where Tsuruoka’s associates hook an early target, and the circus tunes which envelope him at the film’s opening and closing hinting that this is all in some ways a farce even as Tsuruoka is haunted by the ghosts his narcissistic greed has birthed. Then again perhaps he too is merely a product of his times, cynical, mistrustful of authority, and seeking independence from a hypocritical social order but discovering only failure and exile in his unfeeling hubris. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Creature Called Man (豹は走った, Kiyoshi Nishimura, 1970)

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By the late 1960s, Japan had more or less achieved its economic miracle yet there was still a degree of political tension manifesting itself in a second round of widespread protests towards the automatic renewal of the security treaty with the Americans in 1970. The third feature from Kiyoshi Nishimura, The Creature Called Man (豹は走った, Jaga wa Hashitta) anticipates the cinema of paranoia which was to take hold in the 1970s but as confused as its internal politics sometimes are, reflects the continuing sense of dissatisfaction in the wake of the student movement’s failure in its attempt to critique ongoing complicity with American foreign policy in Asia as well as Japan’s checkered geopolitical history. 

As such, Nishimura opens with hand-coloured stock footage of civil unrest in an Asian nation while the accompanying voiceover features protestors chanting “down with Jakar”, later revealed to be the ousted dictator of “Southnesia”, seemingly a stand-in for the recently assassinated Sukarno of Indonesia. As opposed to the rather pompous English title, the Japanese is simply “Jakar got away”, a phrase repeated during the opening titles and which appears as “Jaguar got away” on a typewriter sitting above the Japanese title in red which uses the character for leopard in place of Jakar’s name. In fact, animal codenames will later become something of an ironic motif with the hero referred to as a German shepherd while his rival brands himself a wolf and is referred to by his handlers as the black panther. 

This slightly tongue-in-cheek use of spy movie cliche is in keeping with the brand of humour often found in Toho’s ‘60s spy spoofs though this is largely a much more serious affair if one with an undercurrent of absurdity. The hero, Toda (Yuzo Kayama), is an Olympic sharpshooter working for the Tokyo police before he is abruptly asked to resign so that he can take part in a “special mission” which turns out to be as a backup bodyguard for Jakar who has been smuggled out of his home nation and intends to defect to America which has, it is implied, been backing his regime as a bulwark against communism in Asia while his rise to power was facilitated by Japanese soldiers who stayed in the country after the war. He’s supposed to be staying for a few days in a top hotel while the Americans figure out the paperwork for him to seek asylum at their embassy but the top brass are worried the revolutionaries might try to assassinate him on Japanese soil which would be very bad for diplomatic relations and potentially create political instability across the continent. 

As Toda later says, he’s just doing his job (even though he’s technically no longer a policeman), so he doesn’t give much thought to the wider political context of his actions only concentrating on preserving a man’s life no matter now steeped in blood that life might be. Meanwhile, a duplicitous corporation, Dainihonboeki (lit. Great Japan Trading) is attempting to cut some shady deals apparently having facilitated Jakar’s escape but now frustrated that the Revolutionary Government won’t honour their contracts for military equipment and so is offering to help assassinate him to prevent his forming an alternative government in exile and creating additional problems for the new regime. 

Kujo (Jiro Tamiya), the killer for hire, and the dutiful policeman Toda are exposed as two sides of the same coin, Toda later killing an innocent woman mistaking her for a member of the conspiracy against Jakar only to later learn she is in fact a war widow whose fiancé was an American GI killed in Vietnam. Her exaggerated death sequence filmed with expressionist flare in mimicking that of a soldier gunned down in battle. The two men face off against each other in what is essentially a battle of wits, Toda not taking aim at Kujo but anticipating his plan and foiling it before it takes effect. Leaning in to the Toho spoof, there is considerable absurdity in their machinations, waiters falling to the ground after the rope they were climbing to sneak in through a window is shot through, or sex workers brought in to shine a guiding light towards the target, but there’s a lot of blood and terror too not to mention some sleaze and a general sense of nastiness. Once the Jakar matter is concluded, the men still have a score to settle, facing off in a one-on-one duel in a disused aircraft hangar firing potshots at each other from behind various pieces of military equipment their life and death struggle shot in elegant slow motion until they each collapse into the swirling dust in a moment of nihilistic futility as another civil war quietly brews in Southnesia precipitated by their actions. 

Strikingly composed capturing the neon-lit nightscape of an increasingly prosperous Tokyo filled with the shining lights of new corporate entities and scored with noirish jazz and occasional flights into expressionism, Nishimura’s paranoid political thriller takes aim at a new world of geopolitical instability while making villains of amoral capitalists and indulging in a mild anti-Americanism but most of all is a tug of war between a hitman inconveniently regaining his humanity and a policeman temporarily abandoning his in questionable national service. 

The Hot Little Girl (しびれくらげ, Yasuzo Masumura, 1970)

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“Using women to make money is the same as a yakuza” a repentant gangster insists on confronting the real big bad of exploitative corporate power in Yasuzo Masumura’s ironic exploration of corruptions of a consumerist society. Ironically given the rather salacious title The Hot Little Girl (しびれくらげ, Shibure Kurage), the Japanese a more suggestive Numbing Jellyfish, Masumura’s spicy drama finds an exploited woman fighting back to reclaim her own image and agency by seizing the tools used against her in the company of a sensitive yakuza himself tiring of the amoral world of contemporary gangsterdom. 

Once an ordinary coffeeshop waitress, Midori (Mari Atsumi) is now a successful model thanks to the efforts of her salaryman boyfriend Hiroshi (Yusuke Kawazu). Completely in love with him, Midori is convinced they will one day be married while Hiroshi is obsessed with corporate success and ultimately intends to buy his own advancement with her body by acquiescing to an indecent proposal from an American department store owner to strike a massive trade deal none of his colleagues had been able to broker. Shocked and disgusted Midori refuses but is later won over by Hiroshi’s rather dubious arguments that she must sleep with the American for the good of Japan along with their personal happiness, insisting that nothing will change between them while her sacrifice will buy a more secure footing for their mutual future. 

After the deed is done she seeks additional reassurance, heading straight to Hiroshi’s apartment where they again make love he insisting she is “clean” as the day she was born. In this instance he sells her body directly, though as others point out he was already doing something similar in selling her image for his own gain. Yet he is not the only person to do so, Midori’s feckless father who ruined himself embezzling money to spend on a bar hostess and thereafter going to jail, goes out on the town claiming to be a movie star and showing off Midori’s magazine spread to a woman at a bar who turns out to be there with a petty yakuza. They decide to run a scam on him, demanding compensation for messing with a yakuza’s girl while setting the amount so high they know he’ll never pay intending to press the pretty daughter, should he have one, into sex work in a fairly common gangster manoeuvre. 

The flaw in their plan is that the feisty Midori is less than attached to her dad who continues to ruin her life with his fecklessness, a drunken fool who steals her money and gets himself into trouble. It’s clear that he sees Hiroshi as something of a meal ticket, while Midori sees a marriage to him as a path towards a more stable, conventional life. Nevertheless, she finds herself unable to abandon her father, bravely standing up to the yakuza who threaten her and eventually saved by sensitive gangster Kenji (Ryo Tamura) who instantly sympathises with her situation having grown up with an abusive father he once tried but failed to kill. The gang he’s with are old school yakuza not yet part of the newly corporatising breed, still running petty scams pressing women into sex work through blackmail or parental debt. 

Yet those two worlds are, the film suggests, beginning to merge. The corporation is founded on an image of female exploitation, Hiroshi pimping out his girlfriend while his bosses giggle about it jokingly referring to her as a secret weapon for the company. On being confronted with her father’s problematic past, Hiroshi makes Midori an ultimatum to sever ties with her dad or break up with him because associating with the yakuza will ruin his career despite the fact that he is really no different himself in his desire to exploit her. Kenji’s boss Yamano (Daigo Kusano) instructs him to make Midori his woman and then put her work, but he refuses while Midori eventually opts for an ironic revenge that will quite literally buy her freedom not only from the corporate world but from yakuza threat in allowing Kenji to free himself. Together they determine to “become ordinary people again”, attempting to shake off both parental failure and the corruptions of a rabidly consumerist society to resist the commodification of body and image in world in which everything has a price and nothing any value. 

Too Young to Die (死ぬにはまだ早い, Kiyoshi Nishimura, 1969)

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Perhaps more or less forgotten for reasons we’ll come to later, Kiyoshi Nishimura was for a time a successful director associated with Toho’s line of noirish B-movie action dramas. When the Japanese cinema industry entered its decline in the 1970s, Nishimura shifted into similarly themed TV drama and was well respected for his ability to turn in on time and on budget. None of that mattered however when he was engulfed in scandal in 1987 after being caught operating spy cams in the female only area of a public bathhouse bringing his career to an abrupt end. Directing a few more projects under the name Yusai Ito, he sadly took his own life a few years later in 1993 at the age of 61. 

Nishimura’s 1969 debut Too Young to Die (死ぬにはまだ早い, Shinu ni wa Mada Hayai), however, is a masterclass in high tension filmed with shaky handheld set largely in a single location and imbued with a singular irony replete as it is with cosmic coincidences as a collection of customers at a roadside bar are taken hostage by a crazed criminal with a gun intent on finding the lover of the girlfriend he claims to have murdered for her infidelity. The heroes, however, are ennui-filled couple Matsuoka (Koji Takahashi) and Yumiko (Mako Midori) who are in fact not married, or at least not to each other, but carrying on an extra-marital affair which may be on the cusp of fizzling out. A former racing champ who claims he just got bored with the sport one day and now works for a company selling accessories for toy cars, Matsuoka is supposed to drive Yumiko home where she’s expecting a call from her controlling husband, away on a business trip, at 1am. These are all reasons they are unusually nervous about a police checkpoint searching for an armed fugitive, deciding to stop off at a roadside bar for a stiff drink and something to eat. Only, shortly after their arrival a young man (Toshio Kurosawa) in denim enters giving each of the other men intense side eye before shooting a policeman who comes in to make enquiries about the fugitive. 

The unnamed young tough takes the entire bar hostage intent on finding his lover’s lover, overcome with a sense of cosmic irony when Matsuoka calmly points out he may have arrived too early and the man he’s looking for had not yet arrived when he put the place in lockdown. Before the gunman’s arrival, Nishimura introduces us to each of the other customers via the handy device of two teenage girls apparently stranded and asking around for a lift back to the city. A middle-aged doctor (Chuzaburo Wakamiya), apparently a regular, eventually offers to take them but is dissuaded by the barman (Kazuya Oguri) who reminds him he’s been drinking too heavily to take passengers, while a taxi driver (Shigeki Ishida) who seems to be feeling unwell flat out refuses. The other customers are a suspicious looking man in a trenchcoat (Daigo Kusano) sitting in the corner piling matchsticks, and a newlywed couple who we later learn saved up for their wedding for three years, the wife (Nami Tamura) already going through her accounts book irritated by her friends’ decision to graffiti their car and wondering how much it’ll cost to get it cleaned up while the husband (Tatsuyoshi Ehara) disappoints her by wanting to rush home because he’s planning to return to work the next morning ahead of schedule. 

The relationships of the two couples are often directly contrasted, Matsuoka and Yumiko unsure of their connection as adulterous lovers while the newly married couple also seem be under strain even before the traumatic events about to take place. Apparently brokenhearted, the gunman collapses over the jukebox playing a series of melancholy songs about lost love, Matsuoka later darkly musing that perhaps he was only able to kill his lover because he loved her so much. Unlike the other customers, Matsuoka appears entirely unperturbed by their predicament calmly talking to the gunman and even ringing the police to ask them to temporarily stand back so they can evacuate a hostage in need of medical treatment. The gunman sends Matuoka and the newlywed husband to take the injured party out, taking Yumiko hostage as security while she fears Matsuoka does not value her enough to return though both men do in fact come back rather than abandon their respective women. The newlywed husband, however, later fails a test of manhood when the enraged gunman goes off on a misogynistic rant and tries to force the doctor to rape the newlywed wife to prove that all women faithless “whores”, the husband reduced to a gibbering wreck cowering in the corner unable to protect his new wife or challenge the gunman’s authority as Matsuoka later does when he orders Yumiko to remove her clothes in front of the other hostages. 

Though Yumiko had feared the affair was on its way out, ironically describing Matsuoka as not so different from her husband while lamenting that their connection seemed to have dwindled, the traumatic experience seems to reinforce the reality of their love as something more than a casual extra-marital fling even as Matsuoka forgives her for not trusting him because their relationship is not founded on the same idea of “commitment” as the married couple. The question for the other customers is how much the lives of others they’ve only just met really mean to them, the two teenage girls deciding to attempt escape while the gunman takes Yumiko hostage to use the bathroom, the doctor edging round the sides as Matsuoka tries to stop them to protect her while the newlyweds similarly waltz towards the door. All the while the TV crackles with an inane variety show complete with its cheerful advertisements while the police apparently have the place surrounded ironically convincing the gunman he has no way out and therefore nothing to lose. A tense meditation on interpersonal relationships, Too Young to Die is not without its share of ironies in strange number of coincidences and misapprehensions as the siege eventually draws to an unexpected close sending our conflicted lovers back into the night if perhaps a little more alive for their brush with death. 

Father (父, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1988)

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Keisuke Kinoshita’s long career spanned 45 years producing 49 films between 1943 and 1988. After joining Shochiku in 1933, he directed his first film, Port of Flowers, 10 years later and subsequently went on to direct some of the best loved classics in Japanese cinema such as the iconic Twenty-Four Eyes. Though sometimes dismissed by international critics as overly sentimental, Kinoshita’s comedies were often mercilessly cynical and his later work became progressively darker. His final film, however, Father (父, Chichi), skews the other way, chronicling a son’s gradual acceptance of his feckless dad as he prepares to come of age himself. 

As the film opens, the titular “father”, Kikutaro Higure (Eiji Bando), is launching a failed bid for political office in his beloved Kagoshima (his major policy is putting a giant umbrella on a local volcano to deal with the ash problem) while his son, the narrator Daijiro (Makoto Nonomura), is only four. Disappointed by his failure, Kikutaro moves the family to Kumamoto where he becomes a househusband while his long-suffering wife, Yae (Kiwako Taichi), runs a small bar. Daijiro is now six and is facing the first of many family crises because his mum has had enough and has asked for a divorce. The last straw was Kikutaro raiding her savings without permission to pour into another harebrained scheme to put on an all female pro-wrestling show. A late in the game plea from Daijiro’s sensible grandma (Kin Sugai) encourages the couple to try again, moving to Osaka and then to Tokyo but apparently taking all their problems with them. 

If she had to choose, Daijiro’s grandma would pick her daughter-in-law Yae over her son any day. “What a mistake I made giving birth to a son like that” she laments, “I’m beyond regret, I’m angry”. Kikutaro certainly is an exasperating sort of man, careering from one get rich quick scheme to another but never really taking anything seriously enough to see it through. Grandma assumes he’ll want her to help him repair his marriage (not least because he can’t support himself and is dependent on Yae to look after him) but he appears not to care at all, simply stating that he can always “find a replacement” for a wife but Daijiro is irreplaceable. If it were not for that comment, you could perhaps make a case for Kikutaro as an early example of the new man prepared take on child care duties in a strongly patriarchal society where he is the only dad attending parent and teacher meetings, but predictably Kikutaro is mostly doing it because he’s lazy. Taken out on a walk so grandma and Kikutaro can talk, Daijuro goes “missing” leaving Yae convinced he’s been abuducted but it turns out he got distracted by some pachinko balls and stopped to pick them up because that’s obviously what his dad has him doing while he’s supposed to be looking after him. 

Nevertheless, Kikutaro ends up sending Daijiro back to Kagoshima to live with grandma until the couple eventually reunite and take him back to live with them in Tokyo. That doesn’t last long either, and while his mother lands on her feet and works hard to make a life for them running a Spanish restaurant, Kikutaro bounces around trying out a host of other harebrained schemes until fetching up asking for money to launch a singing career for his new friend from Brazil, a Japanese-speaking black American man whom he treats in an entirely questionable way (the film is very of its time in terms of its racial politics), essentially selling the incongruity of a foreigner singing the Japanese songbook but later beating him when he somehow “insults” Kikutaro’s favourite ode to Kagoshima simply by performing it. 

The teenage Daijiro describes his dad as a “problem parent”, but like the rest of his family finds it extremely difficult to abandon him despite the fact that being a relative of Kikutaro seems to be completely exhausting. We even see him kick off at his sister-in-law’s funeral about wanting more money and not being respected as the eldest son. Yae constantly asks for a divorce and gets countless other offers from better men but never officially separates from Kikutaro who, despite his earlier protestations, always comes back to her (but only when he wants something). Daijiro begins to feel sorry for his father who seems to be moving further and further away from his beloved Kagoshima after vowing to return only once he’d become a success. He thinks he sees him at the iconic Ohara festival where grandma is cheerfully participating in the traditional song and dance parade, calling out but as usual receiving no reply. Kikutaro is a failure of a father, but perhaps in the new context of the bubble economy it no longer matters quite as much as might have done before. Daijiro at least seems to have rejected his example, but like everyone else chooses to forgive him as a loveable rogue rather than a deadbeat dad while secretly longing for his return. 

Original Trailer (no subtitles)

Mandala (曼陀羅, Akio Jissoji, 1971)

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Mandala jissoji poster 2Politically speaking, the Japan of 1971 was trapped in a kind of limbo. The student movement had been dealt a serious blow with widespread supressionary measures in the run-up to the renewal of the ANPO treaty in 1970, which was finally signed despite opposition. It was not, however, yet dead and would stumble on, losing its way, until the climactic events of Asama-Sanso in 1972. Following hot on the heels of his radical This Transient Life, Akio Jissoji’s second film for ATG Mandala (曼陀羅) finds him exploring just this conflict as two young men look for “utopia” in an escape from the tyranny of time.

Kyoto uni students Shinichi (Koji Shimizu) and Hiroshi (Ryo Tamura) have taken their girlfriends to a strange little beachside inn for a spot of wife swapping. Where Shinichi’s girlfriend Yukiko (Akiko Mori) is only too happy to oblige her boyfriend’s whims, Hiroshi’s squeeze Yasuko (Ryo Tamura) goes along with it but instantly regrets her decision. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, the couples are being spied on by weird ultra-Buddhist cult leader Maki (Shin Kishida) who comes to the conclusion that Shinichi and Yukiko are good candidates to add to their commune which is built around the concepts of agriculture and eroticism. Maki’s violent recruitment method is knocking out the guys and then subduing the women so they can be raped by cult members and thereby inducted.

Maki’s strange philosophy which posits a new “utopian” future born of a return to a more primitive way of life in which love does not exist and sex is a free and natural act whose only purpose is reproduction, wins an acolyte of Shinichi because of its key offering – the ability to stall time. Always looking for a way to be dead yet alive, Shinichi is obsessed with the idea of stillness. Movement is the image of time passing. Coming to and finding the comatose, naked body of Yukiko lying on the beach after being raped by Maki’s minions, Shinichi cannot resist the urge to have sex with her “lifeless” body (which she apparently consents to, playing dead even after regaining consciousness part way through). Yukiko too confesses her own fantasy of being ravished as a corpse, a body outside of conscious time.

Shinichi, proclaiming he no longer believes in the future or in that a classless anti-State will ever arise, leaves the struggle and joins Maki’s atavistic utopia to which only those who “deny time and history” are permitted. Hiroshi, meanwhile, berates him for betraying the “continuous revolution” while he himself is on the run having left university after a disagreement with his Trotskyist protest group. The two men are each fleeing the centre and heading in different directions if perhaps ultimately bound for a similar destination. A hyper individualist, Hiroshi declares that there is no such thing as mankind, only a confluence of individuals, with the exception perhaps of those who have dedicated themselves to religion. He doesn’t want the child that Yasuko is carrying, not because he fears it may be Shinichi’s, but because he does not see the point in contributing to “the multiplication of mankind”, which is a key tenet of of Maki’s primitivist manifesto.

Unlike Hiroshi, Yasuko is not seeking revolution but conventionality. She wants the baby, and perhaps a marriage. At the end of her tether, having suffered horribly at the hands of Maki’s minions, she draws a small cottage with a friendly bird flying above as if to symbolise the simple dream that has been destroyed by the cruelty of men. Too late, Hiroshi realises that his irritation with Yasuko was simply a reaction against the shadow of himself he saw reflected in her, and he cannot forgive those who have caused her harm.

Harm there is plenty. Maki’s vile philosophy, overseen by his shaman wife (Yoshihiro Wakabayashi), supposedly the embodiment of many gods, strips women of their right to autonomy, insisting that “love” is an unwelcome modern sophistication which should be replaced by “benevolence” in an egalitarian affection for all mankind. In “ancient times”, he says, a woman would willingly submit to a man and, therefore, there was no such thing as “rape”. “A woman’s silence and resistance make a man a rapist” he tells his minions while Shinichi is busy raping the latest kidnap victim in a room equipped with CCTV for Maki to watch from behind a screen. His tenet of fecundity, both in terms of agriculture and human reproduction, comes at the cost of basic human decency and reduces the role of women to mere vessels for men’s desires.

Throughout the history of Japanese cinema, “love” has indeed been the destabilising, individualising force which threatens the social fabric, but for Maki it serves as a palpable evil. Like Hiroshi, he too believes that men exist as individuals, but also that “benevolence” could raise them to become a “community”. Hiroshi wants to live in a world of revolution, free of charisma and religion, but Shinichi seems to have found peace in atavistic simplicity. Faced with the choice, Hiroshi again chooses individualism, declaring that he would rather die alone than go mad along with everyone else. Yet his frustration may perhaps take him to a dark and unexpected place that sees him pick up a sword and a copy of the Manyoshu as if on some sort of nationalistic mission of revenge against an intransigent government and society. Revolutions fail, and then they start again. Hiroshi has perhaps picked a side, even if that side is merely opposition, but what he’s chosen is movement, action, maybe even life however fleeting, over the cold meaninglessness of Maki’s grand plan for a primitivist utopia.

Mandala is the second of four films included in Arrow’s Akio Jissoji: The Buddhist Trilogy box set which also features an introduction and selected scene commentaries by scholar of the Japanese New Wave David Desser plus a 60-page booklet with new writing by Tom Mes and Anton Bitel.

Original trailer (English subtitles, NSFW)

Pleasures of the Flesh (悦楽, Nagisa Oshima, 1965)

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Pleasures of the Flesh posterHaving joined Shochiku apparently on a whim, Nagisa Oshima dramatically walked out on his home studio when they abruptly shelved his incendiary film Night and Fog in Japan citing political concerns following the assassination of the Socialist Party president by a right wing agitator. Oshima’s decision to abandon the studio system and form his own independent production company would eventually develop into a small movement, leading into that which would retrospectively be termed the “Japanese New Wave”. The first film produced by Sozo-sha, Pleasures of the Flesh (悦楽, Etsuraku), was perhaps a shift towards “pink film” aesthetics though, as in much of Oshima’s work, eroticism is more tool and trap than it is a mechanism for liberation. Ironically titled, Pleasures of the Flesh is a tale of desire frustrated by an oppressive society provoking nothing more than nihilistic need for psychological abandon.

Wakizaka (Katsuo Nakamura), an unsuccessful young man, pines for his first love – a young girl he tutored when he was a college student and she a precocious high schooler. Shoko (Mariko Kaga) has, however, married – her new husband someone more in keeping with her class and social standing. Wakizaka sees himself attend Shoko’s wedding, dreaming of her running away from the altar in her wedding dress to return to him but, no, he remains little more than a pleasant memory for the woman who has come to define his life. So devoted to Shoko was Wakizaka that when he learned from her family that a man who had molested her when she was just a child had returned to cause yet more harm by attempting to blackmail them, Wakizaka wanted to help. Seeing the man and paying him off convinced Wakizaka that the man would never give up and there would be no final payment or assurance of silence. Following him onto his train home Wakizaka took drastic action for justice, or perhaps it was revenge, or even out of a strange kind of jealousy, but nevertheless he transgressed by pushing the man from a moving train and thereby ending the threat posed to his beloved.

Wakizaka’s problems, however, are far from over. As ever in Japanese cinema, someone is always watching – in this case, a corrupt government official looking for a likely stooge with whom to stash a large amount of embezzled cash. Irony, a minor theme of the picture, rears its head as Wakizaka finds himself blackmailed over the murder of a blackmailer. The official makes a deal with him – Wakizaka must keep living in his same old horrible apartment and hang on to the suitcase full of money without opening it until he gets out of jail which is where he assumes he will shortly be headed now that his scam is reaching the tipping point. Wakizaka has little choice but to agree but when Shoko marries someone else he comes to believe his original transgression has been in vain, his life is now meaningless, and all that remains for him is a lonely death. Hence, he might as well go in style by spending all of that stolen doe, committing a bizarre act of revenge against Shoko and an unkind society by enjoying a year of debauchery followed by suicide before the official gets out of jail and turns him in as another act of retaliation.

Rejected in love, Wakizaka’s quest becomes one of continual search for conquest as he attempts to force himself on various women he wants to pretend are Shoko though of course knows are not. His approaches are many and various but begin with the obvious – he rents a fancy apartment and convinces a bar girl who looks a little like Shoko to live with him as his wife in return for a generous salary and the promise that the arrangement will only last a year. Hitomi (Yumiko Nogawa) is willing enough to submit herself to Wakizaka’s demands but he is dissatisfied by the inescapable hollowness of the relationship, uncertain who is using whom in this complicated series of transactions. His second choice is a married woman whose ongoing misery arouses in him a taste for sadism, convinced that the only way to make her “happy” is to plunge her into pain and suffering. The third woman, Keiko (Hiroko Shimizu), proves his biggest challenge – a feminist doctor afraid of men, she keeps him at arms length until he finally attempts to rape her, though this too she manages to frustrate insisting that he marry her even if they divorce a month later when Wakizaka’s time limit rolls around. Sick of Keiko’s resistance, Wakizaka opts for a mute prostitute who literally cannot talk back to him but finally makes her own defiant act of self actualisation despite Wakizaka’s attempt to assert total dominance over her existence.

Wakizaka uses the money for a life of “pleasure” but finds only despair and emptiness in each of his manufactured relationships. Having failed to “earn” it, he tries to buy love, but what he really chases is death and oblivion along with a way out of his ruined life and the humiliation he feels in his perceived failure to win Shoko’s heart. An idealised figure of elegance and purity, Shoko is an unattainable prize – the parents gentle pressing of an envelope into his hands following his “handling” of the blackmail case a subtle reminder that he is a servant, and now one perhaps cast out as tainted with a scandal they all wish to forget. Money, another recurrent motif, brings with it only sorrow and resentment. The embezzled cash didn’t do anyone any good, and neither of the blackmailers manages to make their scheme work out for them. Wakizaka is a haunted man, not so much by his crime which he sees as morally justified and feels no particular guilt over, but by his unresolvable desires as surfacing in his frequent hallucinations of Shoko who echoes in and round each and every woman in a form created entirely by her adoring suitor. In the end, reality betrays where the simulacrum remains true, but it is Wakizaka who betrays himself in allowing his pure love to become perverse revenge in the ultimate individualist act of self harm.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Hanzo the Razor: Who’s Got the Gold? (御用牙　鬼の半蔵やわ肌小判, Yoshio Inoue, 1974)

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Hanzo the razor who's got the gold posterAll things must come to an end, and so the third instalment in the Hanzo the Razor series, Who’s Got the Gold? (御用牙　鬼の半蔵やわ肌小判, Goyokiba: Oni no Hanzo yawahada koban) is the last. To be frank the central tenet is wearing a bit thin (not least because Hanzo’s been bashing away at it with a mallet for the last two movies), and though scripted by the previous film’s director, Yasuzo Masumura, direction has been handed to the less experienced studio director Yoshio Inoue. Consequently, Who’s Got the Gold? is the most obviously parodic entry in the series, camping it up in grand style as Hanzo (Shintaro Katsu) goes after a more obvious kind of vice in the form of greedy, entitled lords, corrupt priesthood, and a nation too obsessed with its past to survive in a rapidly modernising era.

Inoue opts for a purely theatrical opening as Hanzo’s two ex-con underlings, Devil and Viper, enjoy a spot of night fishing whilst dreaming about having enough money to head to the red light district. They get the fright of their lives when they think they see a creepy ghost woman emerging from the lake. Being Devil and Viper they panic and run home screaming to report this terrifying incident to their brave protector Hanzo. Hanzo is in the middle of his usual “tool polishing” routine but fancies paying a visit this mysterious lake because, well, it might be fun to try having sex with a ghost for once. Devil and Viper are very confused by this idea, but it’s par for the course with Hanzo and so off they go.

Of course, the ghost lady is not a real ghost so only part of Hanzo’s lusts are satisfied as he performs his normal sort of “special torture” on her and finds out that she’s part of an ongoing scam in which treasury officials have been skimming off some of the gold they’re supposed to be protecting. Sadly, Hanzo’s investigations hit a snag when the woman’s husband turns up and kills her for having been raped by Hanzo before promptly getting killed himself.

Hanzo does not approve of any of these goings on and fully intended to arrest the treasury officers if only they hadn’t gone and died first. Accordingly he reports all of this to his superiors but advises against prosecutions because he sympathises with the difficult position these men found themselves in. Being a samurai is not cheap and these lowly jobs are very badly paid – how are you supposed to maintain your house to the manner required without resorting to extreme measures when your lord is snaffling all the money and not paying his retainers what they’re owed. It will not come as a surprise that the lord didn’t want to hear this, and so Hanzo marks his card. It didn’t really help that Hanzo’s walk into the castle involved running a gauntlet of unfortunate samurai forced to kneel along the path all day just hoping that the lord would show them some favour. Among them was a old friend of Hanzo’s who receives a tactless offer of fixed employment if only he will give up a family heirloom that the lord has been admiring.

The gold smuggling subplot runs in parallel with another problem – a doctor whom the lord has ordered Hanzo to arrest because he was advocating the adoption of Western technologies, fearing that the nation was leaving itself dangerously vulnerable if it refused to modernise. The doctor, like the girl’s father in the first film, is dying of a terminal illness and so Hanzo thinks the sentence can wait. Hiding the doctor in his house he listens to his ideas and then comes to the same conclusion, allowing him to finish building a cannon to prove to the lord just how destructive these new weapons really are and just how dangerous it would be to fight them with only katanas and samurai spirit. Hanzo lives in interesting times, but this dilemma says something both about the precarious position of the samurai order in the face of increasing modernisation and about the 1970s background in which a small war was currently being waged against American imperialism.

As usual Hanzo refuses to bow. He will not give in to bullies or those who abuse their authority to add additional oppression onto an already oppressed populace which he has pledged his life to protecting. The contradiction of being a rapist so well endowed that afterwards no one seems to mind has still not been solved, but by this third instalment in the series the “joke” is so well worn as to receive little attention. Who’s Got the Gold? is weakest of the three adventures for Hanzo and his well conditioned razor but it has its charms, if only in the troublingly easy way that its central conceit has become so essentially normalised as to be barely noticed.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Hanzo the Razor: The Snare (御用牙　かみそり半蔵地獄責め, Yasuzo Masumura, 1973)

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Hanzo the Razor the Snare posterYasuzo Masumura had spent the majority of his career at Daiei, but following the studio’s bankruptcy, he found himself out on his own as a freelance director for hire. That is perhaps how he came to direct this improbable entry in his filmography on the second of a trilogy of exploitation leading jidaigeki films for Toho. Essentially a vanity project for former Zatoichi star Shintaro Katsu who both produces and stars in the series, Hanzo the Razor: The Snare (御用牙　かみそり半蔵地獄責め , Goyokiba: Kamisori Hanzo Jigoku Zeme) is another tale of the well endowed hero of the Edo era protecting ordinary people from elite corruption, but Masumura, providing the script himself, bends it to his own will whilst maintaining the essential house style.

Hanzo (Shintaro Katsu) chases a pair of crooks right into the path of treasury officer Okubo. As expected, the lord and his retainers kick off but Hanzo won’t back down, shouting loudly about honour and justice much to his lord’s displeasure. Eventually Hanzo takes the two crooks into custody and they tell him exactly what’s happened to them this evening – they snuck over from the next village to steal some rice from the watermill but they found a dead girl in there and so they were running away in terror. Hanzo investigates and finds the partially clothed body still lying in the mill untouched but when he takes a closer look it seems the girl wasn’t exactly murdered but has died all alone after a botched abortion. Realising she smells of the incense from a local temple, Hanzo gets on the case but once again ends up uncovering a large scale government conspiracy.

Though it might not immediately seem so, Masumura’s key themes are a perfect fit for the world of Hanzo. In his early contemporary films such as Giants & Toys and Black Test Car, Masumura had painted a grim view of post-war society in which systemic corruption, personal greed, and selfishness had destroyed any possibility of well functioning human relationships. It was Masumura’s belief that true freedom and individuality was not possible within a conformist society such as Japan’s but this need for personal expression was possible through sexuality. Sex is both a need and a trap as Masumura’s (often) heroines chase their freedom through what essentially amounts to an illicit secret, using and manipulating the men around them in order to improve their otherwise dire lack of agency.

Hanzo’s investigation takes him into an oddly female world of intrigue in which a buddhist nun has been duped into becoming a middle-woman in a government backed scheme pimping innocent local girls to the highest bidder among a gang of wealthy local merchants. Hanzo berates the parents of the murdered girl for not having kept a better eye on her, but these misused women are left with no other recourse than the shady protection of others inhabiting the same world of corrupt transactions such as the local shamaness who has developed a “new method of abortion” just as Hanzo has developed a “new method of torture” which involves a bizarrely sexualised ritual in which both parties must be fully naked before she enacts penetration with her various instruments. Hanzo first tries more usual torture methods on the nun before indulging in his trademark tactic of trapping her in a net to be raised and lowered onto his oversize penis which he keeps in top notch by beating it with a stick and ramming it into a bag of rough uncooked rice.

Unlike the first film, the women are less ready to fall for Hanzo’s giant member. The nun complains loudly that her Buddhist vows of chastity are being violated while Hanzo’s later rape of the woman who runs the local mint is a much more violent affair. Hanzo grapples with her legs as she struggles, gasping as he opens his loincloth and reveals his surprisingly large appendage, once again playing into the fallacy that all women harbour some kind of rape fantasy. Hanzo has done this, he claims, to “calm her down”, because he could sense her sexual frustration and desperate need for male contact. To be fair to Hanzo, he does appear to be correct in his reading of the woman’s behaviour as she sheds her anxiety and becomes a firm devotee of the cult of Hanzo.

Meanwhile, political concerns bubble in the background as the main conspiracy revolves around consistent currency devaluations which are placing a stranglehold on the fortunes of the poor while their overlords, who are supposed to be protecting them, spend vast sums on claiming the virginity of innocent young girls. Hanzo may be a rapist himself (though he makes it clear that he derives no pleasure from his actions and only gives pleasure to the women involved), but he draws the line at the misuse of innocents, saving a little girl about to be violated by the master criminal Hamajima (Kei Sato) in a daring confrontation in which he boldly brings his own coffin, just in case.

Masumura broadly sticks to the Toho house style, but gone is the camp comedy of the first instalment with its giggly gossipers and humorous shots of Hanzo’s permanently erect penis. Instead he opts for an increase in sleazy voyeurism, filling the screen with female nudity whilst neatly implicating the male audience who enjoy such objectification by shooting from secretive angles as his collection of dirty old men crowd round a two way mirror to watch the lucky winner torture and abuse the soft young flesh they’ve just been bidding on. Like Sword of Justice, The Snare also ends with a slightly extraneous coda in which Hanzo settles a dispute with another official by means of a duel he would rather not have fought. Walking off bravely into the darkness, Hanzo utters only the word “idiot” for a man who wasted his life on petty samurai pride. Hanzo has better things to do, protecting the common man from just such men who place hypocritical ideas of pride and honour above general human decency in their need for domination through fear and violence over his own tenet of unrestrained pleasure.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice (御用牙, Kenji Misumi, 1972)

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Hanzo sword of Justice posterJapanese cinema was in a state of flux in the early ‘70s. Audiences were dwindling. Daiei, a once popular studio known for polished, lavish productions folded while Nikkatsu took the proactive measure to rebrand itself as a purveyor of soft core pornography. Toho did not go so far, but in its first foray into a new kind of jidaigeki, exploitation was the name of the game. Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice (御用牙, Goyokiba) was released in 1972 – the same year as the beginning of another seminal series, Lone Wolf and Cub, which was produced by Hanzo’s star, former Zatoichi actor Shintaro Katsu, who also happens to the be brother of the franchise’s lead Tomisaburo Wakayama. Like Lone Wolf and Cub, Hanzo the Razor is based on a manga by Kazuo Koike whose work later provided inspiration for the Lady Snowblood films, and is directed by Lone Wolf and Cub’s Kenji Misumi. It is then of a certain pedigree but its intentions are different. More obviously comedic in its exaggerated, unpleasant sexualised “humour”, Hanzo the Razor is also a tale of the systemic corruption of the feudal order but one which casts its “hero” as a noble rapist.

Honest and steadfast police officer Hanzo (Shintaro Katsu) usually skips the annual swearing in ceremony but this year he’s decided to make an appearance. He appears to have done so to make a personal stand by refusing to sign the policeman’s oath because he knows everyone else is breaking it. Officers may not be doing something so obvious as accepting cash for preferential treatment, but they gladly accept free drinks, gifts from lords, and entertainment in the local geisha houses. Hanzo’s actions, honest as they are, do not go down well with his fellow officers and if he can’t figure something out on time, Hanzo faces the possibility that his career in law enforcement may come to an abrupt end when contracts are up for renewal at the end of the year.

Whatever else Hanzo is, he doesn’t like bullies or those who abuse their authority and the trust placed in them by those they are supposed to be protecting. More than just saving his own skin, Hanzo is determined to unmask the hypocrisy and corruption of his boss, Onishi (Ko Nishimura), who he discovers shares a mistress with a notorious killer still on the run. Chasing this early thread, Hanzo walks straight into a chain of corruption which leads all the way to the top.

At his best, Hanzo is a steadfast champion of the people who remain oppressed by the corrupt and venal samurai order. Far from the a by the books operative, Hanzo is prepared to do what’s best over what’s right as in his decision to help a pair of siblings who are faced with a terrible dilemma trying to care for a terminally ill father. He’s also extremely well prepared, having installed a host of booby traps and hidden weapons caches throughout his home to deal with any conceivable threat. Dedicated in the extreme, Hanzo has also spent long hours testing his torture techniques on himself to find out the exact point of maximum efficiency for each of them.

Here’s where things get a little more unusual. As Hanzo climbs down from a bout of torture, a huge erection is visible inside his loincloth, prompting him to reveal that it’s pain which really turns him on. Later we see Hanzo doing some maintenance on his “tool” which involves placing it on a wooden board bearing a huge penis shaped indent, and hitting it repeatedly with a hammer before ramming it back and forth into a bag of uncooked rice. Each to their own, but Hanzo derives no pleasure from these acts – they are simply to make sure his “special interrogation method” runs at maximum efficiency. Which is to say, Hanzo’s preferred technique for getting women to talk amounts to rape but as each of them fall victim to his oversize member they cry out in pleasure, willing to spill the beans just to get Hanzo to finish what he started. Playing into the fallacy that all women long to be raped, Hanzo’s inappropriate misuse of his own authority is played for laughs – after all, the women eventually enjoy themselves so it’s no harm done, right? Troubling, but par for the course in the world of Hanzo.

This essential contradiction in Hanzo’s character – the last honourable man who nevertheless abuses his authority in the course his duty (though he apparently takes no personal pleasure in the act), is reduced to a roguish foible as he goes about the otherwise serious business of taking down corrupt authority and ensuring the law protects the people it’s supposed to protect. Odd as it is, Hanzo’s world is an strangely sexualised one in which sexually liberated women wield surprising amounts of power. Hanzo is assured one of his targets has “no lesbian tendencies” as other older court ladies are said to, while a gaggle of camp young men gossip about the size of Hanzo’s world beating penis. In an odd move, Misumi even includes a penis eye view of Hanzo’s techniques, superimposed over the face of a woman writhing in pleasure. Surreal and broadly humorous if offensive, Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice is very much of its time though strangely lighthearted in its obviously bizarre worldview.

Original trailer (English subtitles)