Tag: Japanese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

Diamond Diplomacy (Yuriko Gamo Romer, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trailer (no subtitles)

Disobedience (親不孝通り, Yasuzo Masumura, 1958)

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After finding out his older sister has had an abortion after her lover tells her he has no interest in marriage, a college student vows revenge in Yasuzo Masumura’s Disobedience (親不孝通り, Oyafuko Dori). The film’s Japanese title translates as something like “lack of filial piety street” and refers to an area where youth congregates to misbehave, bringing shame on their families with their debauched behaviour. It’s into this world that the cynical hero attempts to drag the sheltered heroine as part of his revenge plot while she apparently decides to stick with him even after he raped her during a college camping trip.

It is though notable that neither of them have much parental input to begin with. Kaneko’s (Hitomi Nozoe) mother has died and we’re told that their father spends all his time with a mistress and never comes home leaving her in the care of older brother Shuichi (Eiji Funakoshi), a salaryman. It’s not exactly clear where Katsuya’s (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) mother is, only that she lives somewhere else and occasionally writes while he is technically in the care of his older sister Akie (Yoko Katsuragi) who works as a tailor in a boutique store selling western fashions. Akie had been carrying on an affair with Shuichi she assumed would lead to marriage and was initially happy about the pregnancy only to be blindsided by Shuichi’s reaction. When he tells her that he has no intention to marry, she realises that the relationship is at a dead end and that an abortion is her only real option given the situation.

The irony is that Katsuya resents Shuichi for failing to take responsibility as a man and vows to take revenge by doing the same thing to his sister and seeing how he likes that. Though Akie points out that it’s nothing to do with Kaneko and tries to stop him, Katsuya is hellbent on playing the cad to make a point. Of course, he may also resent Shuichi, an executive salaryman, precisely because of the position he is in. There has been an economic downturn and he’s having trouble securing a job for after his university graduation. Some companies have halted recruitment entirely and another of Katsuya’s friends has already been through 11 unsuccessful interviews. Other young men have taken to politics, protesting new authoritarian legislation and investing in socialism. Katsuya and friends find this to be disingenuous, assuming it’s just another shrewd move to get on the ladder by finding employment in government or unions. The salaryman dream is a fairly new post-war invention, but it seems to be dying already and Katsuya can’t even really see what his education was for. He tells Kaneko that he only studies well enough to pass so that he can get a good job and the point of life is to figure out how to make money. If he can’t do that, then his life is meaningless and futile. That might be why he spends his time scamming entitled Americans (the only people with money), beating them at bowling, and hanging out in jazz bars. Though the Occupation is long over, the film has a strong but subtle sense of anti-Americanism as symbolised by the aeroplane flying above as Katsuya rapes Kaneko out in the mountains. 

But for Kaneko the situation is not much different. The young women complain it’s even harder for them to secure employment. Katsuya dismisses Kaneko’s university education by calling it a bridal academy, though most of the women lament that marriage is the ultimate job and perhaps the point of university for them is meeting a husband, just as it’s securing employment for Katsuya. Later, when he confronts Shuichi, Katsuya describes Kaneko as damaged goods now that she’s no longer a virgin and is currently carrying a child for which he accepts no responsibility. That may be one reason that she decides to stick with her rapist, realising that her situation is now impossible given it may be difficult for her to marry someone else while supporting herself financially as a single woman is not yet a viable option. By pursuing a relationship with Katsuya, she reasserts control over the situation along with the narrative of what happened between them on the mountains. 

On learning the truth, however, she makes a different decision from Akie in declaring that she will drop out of university and move to Osaka to live with an aunt and raise the baby alone there, declaring that she has decided to go on loving Katsuya no matter what he might think about it. Kaneko’s decision prompts a reversal of Akie’s thinking too. Though she had decided to be independent, starting her own business rather than planning for marriage, she returns to Shuichi and suggests they should get back together. To her the idea of running her own business and being married seem incompatible. Chastened by this whole affair, Shuichi’s thinking seems to have reversed too, to the extent that he decides to marry Akie after all, while Katsuya also decides to accept responsibility and go to Osaka with Kaneko where they will marry and stay together forever. It’s a strange “happy” ending, though it’s difficult to see how these marriages could ever really be happy given the circumstances that led to them and the discordant music that strikes over an ironic Merry Christmas sign as the film comes to an end suggests they probably won’t be. Nevertheless, the ending reverses a lack of filial piety in the shift toward conservatism through heteronormative marriages and the formation of new families as Katsuya, at least, takes responsibility for his paternity and exits the nihilistic world of clubs, bars, and bowling alleys in which his friends remain trapped.

Mag Mag (禍禍女, Yuriyan Retriever, 2025)

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The funny thing is, Mag Mag is only visible to the man she’s currently in love with, though what she seems to represent is the grudge of the unrequited lover whose gaze is never returned. The first release from K2 Pictures, a new production company launched in 2024 with the intention of shaking up the Japanese film industry by moving away from the production committee system, comedienne Yuriyan Retriever’s first feature sets out as if it’s asking why women become fixated on terrible men, only to eventually subvert its central premise with a series of unpredictable twists.

It’s true enough that (almost) all of Mag Mags targets deserve exactly what they get. The men are selfish and insensitive, bullying or abusive. Shunsuke (Fuku Suzuki), the first victim appears meticulously doing his hair in the bathroom mirror as if bearing out his vanity and self-obsession. Many of the men are popular and handsome, but the attention they get has only made them cruel and arrogant. Takuya (Junsei Motojima), the original victim said to have given birth to the curse of Mag Mag, is beloved of half the school but can’t resist punching down by making fun of a girl considered to be unattractive who had left him a love letter. Yurika Yoshida (Marina Mizushima), whose name is very similar to that of the director, is believed by some to have become Mag Mag after taking her own life and cursing Takuya in the process, but most of all represents the ugliness of the male gaze in being constantly berated for her appearance. The other kids tell her to lose weight and get plastic surgery, while Takuya takes her love letter as an insult to his status as king of the school. Mag Mag is described as being “freakishly tall” which also hints at ideas of monstrous femininity.

Perhaps this is one reason why Mag Mag rips out the eyes of her victims, though the point is that they were always pointed in the wrong direction anyway. Sanae is obsessed with an artist named Hiroshi (Oshiro Maeda), though he’s made a nude statue of another named Rumi apparently from his imagination and without her consent, which hints again at the self-involved nature of male desire. He does not appear to really notice Sanae (Sara Minami), though Rumi (Mai Fukagawa) may not be lying when she says he found her creepy. After Hiroshi’s death, Sanae begins investigating Mag Mag in attempt to unmask her and avenge Hiroshi, only to ultimately see herself in the vengeful spirt’s sinister cries of “I love you” which aren’t so different from those expressed for Hiroshi while essentially stalking him from her shrine lair. 

Nevertheless, this misdirected gaze is going in both directions as we, the viewers, too do not really see the person we should have been looking at all along. Deep-seated senses of inadequacy can provoke the jealously and resentment of unexpected and seriously inappropriate targets, and perhaps what we’re looking at here isn’t the societal urge to mock an “unattractive” woman who dares to ask for love, but rather the toxic rage of an invisible man who loathes those who seem to be unfairly popular with women despite being terrible human beings and unpleasant to be around. Perhaps in the end, it’s Sanae’s “delusional” fixation pitted against the passivity of a man who believes himself to be unattractive and in fact becomes so because of his intense self-loathing.

But then, there does appear to be a real ghost and unflinching embrace of the arcane with its Shinto priests, lines of prohibition, and apparently magic trees whose ability to end bad relationships is potentially more than just psychosomatic, or just little psycho. Yuriyan Retriever’s absurdist humour blends perfectly with the grimness of the Mag Mag curse and the world it seems to mirror. With an overt reference to Guard of the Underground, she celebrates and subverts J-horror tropes while skewering contemporary entertainment trends in her house share fantasia of hopeful youngsters that turns out to be a quasi-incestuous nest of betrayal and misplaced desire. Influencers too are a one-way relationship, and you only see what they you want you to. Mag Mag, however, just might let you go if only you’re brave enough to say you love her too rather than, like her unfortunate victims, spurning her affections and thereby invoking and ancient curse born of the suffering of an unreturned gaze.

Mag Mag screens in Chicago 10th April as part of the 20th edition of Asian Pop-Up Cinema.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Beyond the Fire: The Life of Japan’s First Pride Parade Pioneer (熱狂をこえて, Hiroaki Matsuoka, 2026)

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Hiroaki Matsuoka’s documentary Beyond the Fire: The Life of Japan’s First Pride Parade Pioneer (熱狂をこえて, Nekkyo wo Koete) follows the life of Teishiro Minami who started the first Pride parade to take place in Japan in 1994. The film is not, however, an exercise in hagiography and examines Minami’s troubled legacy as someone whose attempts to control the movement ended up destroying it and leading to tragic and unforeseen circumstances. The parade has since been reborn under Tokyo Rainbow Pride which aims for greater inclusivity for sexual minorities and operates out of a community hub where all are welcome.

As for Minami, he was born in 1931 on the island of Sakhalin which was eventually taken by the Russians during the war. The family evacuated to Akita to live with his mother’s relatives, but his father refused to come with them and remained behind. This sense of physical dislocation and displacement only deepened Minami’s sense of rootlessness and lack of belonging having figured out his sexuality while hanging out with part-timers at his family’s shop. With his mother having to support the family single-handed, Minami was keen to start working and got a civil service job after high school working in the local prosecutor’s office. Once his father returned, he asked for a transfer to Tokyo and began looking for the mysterious “House of Secrets” and the gay world he’d read about in magazines.

But after failing to gain a promotion, Minami resigned due to a discomfort about the way of thinking at the prosecutor’s office. His repeated decisions to resign from most of the jobs he held echoes his forthrightness, but also an unwillingness to compromise or inability to work with others who might not agree with him. He quits his job in broadcasting in part because he overhears his colleagues using slur words and speaking disparagingly about men like him which makes his workplace an unpleasant and unsafe environment, though times being what they were he couldn’t exactly complain about it. Most of the men he meets at gay bars when he finally discovers them are unable to be out at work and some of them are married, only able to live their gay lives at weekends. Minami too gets married out of a sense of social obligation and to give his mother grandchildren. As an older man, he seems to feel guilty about the way he abandoned his wife and children to live a more authentic life, but also seeks no kind of reconciliation.

His path to Pride began with a series of gay-themed magazines and a meeting with international activist Bill Schiller who convinced him that the gay rights movement was something that could make a difference in Japan. Having travelled to San Francisco and witnessed the Pride parade there, he begins planning one in Japan but despite the success of the first event, internal divisions came to the fore. The biggest of these was that though Minami had followed Schiller’s example and included lesbians in the movement, he’d largely done it for cynical reasons and really had no interest in working with them, admitting to finding women difficult in general. Admitting now that he went too far, the real crisis arrived when Minami tried to turn the third Pride parade into an exclusively political event, banning outlandish outfits or celebratory behaviour. He intended the parade to end in a rally in which they’d adopt a manifesto he’d written by himself without discussing it with the wider community. When some of them protested, a member of Minami’s team was heard to ask what the women were even doing there, making it clear that the organising committee believed this to be an event solely for gay men. Minami then took back control by excluding women from the committee entirely.

In some ways, his story is a cautionary tale about how strong personalities with a need for control can derail a movement or risk turning it into a vanity project. A young man who’d worked as a part of Minami’s team and had stayed to mediate when protestors stormed the stage later took his own life in despair with the direction things had taken. Many had been uncertain a Pride parade would work in Japan given the levels of hostility and the risks involved for those taking part. Their fear was that no one would come, but attendance was much greater than expected and many joined the parade later, encouraged by seeing that others had already done so and they were not alone. Though many praise Minami’s efforts and activism, not only with the Pride parade but during the AIDS crisis, and acknowledge the importance of his courage in taking the first step towards creating a gay rights movement, they also question his methods and motivations. Using a mixture of animation, archive footage, and talking heads interviews, the film does its best to record this landmark moment in the history of Japan’s LGBTQ+ community through the eyes of an elder statesman but never shies away from his mistakes if only in seeking to learn from them.

Beyond the Fire: The Life of Japan’s First Pride Parade Pioneer screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Impure Nuns (汚れた肉体聖女, Michiyoshi Doi, 1958)

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Shintoho had arisen as a new studio during the labour disputes that engulfed the film industry in the late 1940s and to begin with specialised in artistic fare by orphaned filmmakers such as Kon Ichikawa and Kenji Mizoguchi, but faced with several box office failures it was in red right from the very beginning. After several attempts at relaunches and reorganisations, the studio appointed Mitsugu Okura to work his magic. The owner of a chain of cinemas and a former benshi, Okura had a reputation for being able to turn failing businesses around. His ethos was, however, decidedly populist. He shifted the studio’s focus from artistic films towards the low-budget genre fare with which it became most closely associated such as racy dramas and ghost films.

To that extent, you could say that Shintoho was ahead of its time. Most of the other studios would shift in the same direction as the studio system went into decline, and many of the stars at Toei in the 1960s such as Bunta Sugawara, Tetsuro Tamba, and Tomisaburo Wakayama had their start at Shintoho. Michiyoshi Doi was one of the studio’s key directors, though he often worked on its higher-bow output of literary adaptations. All of which might help to explain the seeming mismatch between the salacious Japanese title of 1958’s Impure Nuns, “Holy Women with Sullied Flesh” (汚れた肉体聖女, Kegareta Nikutai Shojo), and its content, which turns out to be a rather sensitive, sympathetic love story set in a Catholic Convent.

Eri (Miyuki Takakura) is the daughter of the aristocratic Taira family which apparently has a long history of Christianity. She is particularly devout and shortly after we meet her, she genuflects in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Throughout the film the welcoming arms of Mary seem to be contrasted with violent images of Christ on the cross, a presence that seeks to oppress the women in the free embrace of their desire. While her brother’s friend, Tsuyama (Toshio Mimura), is visiting, Eri suggests going into town to get something, but her mother is against it due to reports of some kind of “trouble” plaguing the streets. Tsuyama offers to accompany her, and they are actually beset by a gang of street toughs intent on raping Eri. Tsuyama does his best to fight them off until a policeman eventually arrives and chases them away. But then he ends up raping Eri himself, after which she becomes pregnant and undergoes an abortion at the urging of her parents.

While her father is scandalised and angry, Eri’s mother is sympathetic, but still each of them decide that the best thing to do is send Eri to a nunnery where she can be reborn in Christ. Due to her experiences, Eri seems to have developed a fear of men, but is also known as the strictest and most severe of the nuns. As the captivating Anna (Mayumi Ozora) enters the convent, another woman is being kicked out apparently by Eri for an undisclosed indiscretion with another woman. The mild implication is that Eri’s frustrated sexual desires have been channelled into authoritarianism in the insistence on discipline and punishing its breaches. It may be this that first attracts Anna who, to begin with, seems to be trying to initiate a sadomasochistic relationship by continually doing things to get Eri to punish her, such as singing while working which is, contrary to expectations, considered very bad form for a nun. 

Anna is, however, hardly a typical bride of Christ and is forever dancing and being cheerful. Her influence seems to break Eri out of her asceticism, as she too begins to ignore the rules and become more of herself again. After the convent bizarrely agrees to organise a dance, Eri gives in to her desire for Anna and the two fall in love, sharing a passionate kiss. But Sister Kashiwagi (Junko Uozumi) is watching, not so much because of the scandalous nature of their relationship, but because they are rivals for a coveted opportunity to study abroad in Rome with Eri currently the front runner. The trip to Rome is positioned as the antithesis of Eri’s freedom in her relationship with Anna as a symbol of repression in committing herself to religion. 

But Anna also disrupts the convent as she becomes the centre of a love triangle, while another nun later declares her love for Eri, only to be rebuffed. Sister Kashiwagi is killed by falling down the stairs while physically fighting over Anna, whose affections sometimes seem to wander, while Sister Sone similarly falls in a bottomless swamp that seems to stand in for obsessive desire. The love between the two women begins to amass a body count as they struggle to maintain it. Though it might seem as if the arrival of male policemen might further disrupt the convent, they simply declare their work done when Anna tells them she was asleep when her roommate left and didn’t see anything. But for her part, Anna has already described herself as cursed, abruptly revealing that her mother killed her father and then herself and that everyone in her family meets a bad end. Even her brother (Shuntaro Emi), who turns out to be a rapist and eventually takes his own life, describes her as a kind of demon that ruins everyone around her, and there is something of that in the way that she seems to attract so much attention at the convent.

Yet even when the script seems to want to paint this same-sex love as something dark or evil, Doi resists the impulse and largely depicts the relationship between the two women as something real and true that has beauty and delicacy. There’s something poignant in Eri’s final plea to run away together, and Anna’s reply that there isn’t any point because there’s nowhere they could go where they could live happily together. It’s Anna who now seems unable to break free of the convent, unexpectedly turning on Eri and going back to her bell ringing. The bell may represent a kind of order, but it’s also ironically reminiscent of the original Shintoho logo. In any case when they eventually fall from the tower, the other nuns arrive with flowers and encircle them with sorrow as if in recognition that it wasn’t the love that was a tragedy, but its impossibility. Though its frankness may have shocked audiences at the time, the film avoids the exploitative content suggested by the title, featuring little nudity beyond a silhouette of bared breasts, and embraces overt melodrama, a touch of gothic horror, and the beauty of this love rather attempt to censure or constrain it.

Impure Nuns screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Hunter and the Hunted (油断大敵, Izuru Narushima, 2004)

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The thrill and excitement of being a thief only exist when there’s a great detective around, according to the legendary cat burglar, Nekoda, in Izuru Narushima’s warmhearted crime drama, The Hunter and the Hunted (油断大敵, Yudan Taiteki). The film takes its title from a four-character idiom, a proverb advising that the greatest danger is complacency, which is indeed one of the weapons employed by Neko, nicknamed “the Cat”, as he builds a relationship with the man he hopes will become his greatest adversary. 

Jin (Koji Yakusho) is a widowed single-father coming to the conclusion that his career as a policeman is incompatible with his responsibilities as a parent. Perhaps bearing out the still sexist nature of the early 2000s society, everyone keeps telling him to remarry so that he won’t have to worry about childcare any more, or else find a job that doesn’t require being constantly available in order to work on the criminals’ schedule. The problem is that Jin really likes his job as a thief catcher having transferred from the local police box after his wife passed away from an illness. He really doesn’t want to give it up, but is beginning to feel as if he has no choice. Neko (Akira Emoto) too encourages him to remarry and Jin lets slip that he’s taken a liking to a lady that works at his daughter’s daycare. But though Misaki really likes Makiko (Yui Natsukawa), the thought of her father remarrying causes her to go on a three-day hunger strike. Reluctantly, Jin has to give up on his romantic hopes, though he refuses to do so in terms of his career and in fact goes on to be promoted after receiving a commendation for catching Neko seemingly by chance when he stepped in to fix Misaki’s broken bicycle while Jin was too busy with something else.

It turns out, however, that it wasn’t really by chance at all. Neko has an MO. He essentially allowed Jin to arrest him because he needed medical treatment. Neko’s life of crime means that he can’t enrol on the government health insurance scheme so he can’t afford to go to the hospital where he’d be arrested anyway. Nevertheless, he seems to take a liking to Jin precisely because of his mild-mannered earnestness and tries to teach him how to think like a thief so that when he gets out in 10 years’ time, he’ll be a worthy adversary and their cat and mouse game can truly begin. Having Neko out there gives Jin a concrete reason to stay in the police and polish his skills, while knowing he has Jin to play off gives Neko a sense of purpose in an otherwise aimless life of total freedom. He describes thievery as his calling and claims that as laws are made by humans and a vocation is given by god, he has a right to pursue it that transcends human justice even if Jin scoffs at his sophistry.

Deciding against remarriage, Jin’s main personal relationship outside his daughter becomes that with Neko who is somewhere between friend and adversary. Once Misaki has grown up and tells him that she plans to do humanitarian work abroad after training as a nurse, Jin can’t help but feel betrayed. She prevented him from marrying a woman that he genuinely cared about, but now tells him he should meet the woman the lady from the bakery is trying to set him up with and plans to palm him off on someone else, just as she feared he might do if he married again leaving his new wife care to Misaki and devoting himself to work. But what he realises it that his relationships with Misaki and Neko are basically the same. He has to accept that his daughter has grown up and chosen her own path to follow. It’s time to let her go. Neko, meanwhile, has found his freedom in thievery, and so he will never stop doing it no matter how many times Jin catches him or how many times he escapes. All Neko wants out of life is that they both stay healthy enough to keep playing this game right to the very end so that he can die as a thief having experienced the true joy of battling his nemesis while Jin too enjoys the thrill of the chase as a thief-catcher hot on the trail of a master. Which is to say, no one actually wants to win this game, and what has really come to matter is their extremely co-dependent friendship that transcends the limits of the law.

The Deepest Space in Us (そこにきみはいて, Yasutomo Chikuma, 2025)

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The dress code at Kaori’s office doesn’t seem to be all that formal, but for some reason she alone looks like she’s going to a funeral. As it turns out, there’s a reason for that, but it also reflects the way that her job makes her feel dead inside and how she’s made to feel by a judgemental society that refuses to accept her as she is but punishes and excludes her for living outside of its expected norms and social codes.

Kaori (Momoko Fukuchi) doesn’t usually attend the team’s after work drinking parties, but is dragged along this time only to sit impassively ignoring everyone until a couple of drunk guys press her for her first love story and then ask a series of invasive questions about what kind of guys are her type. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in play here, and their obsessive probing borders on harassment. Kaori eventually gets up and leaves, but is chased by one of the guys who tries to ask her out. She tells him directly that she’s not interested because she doesn’t experience sexual attraction or desire, but that’s like a red flag to a bull for a certain sort of guy and this one laughs in her face after tearing her shirt as she tries to get away. People simply don’t believe her when she tells them, or else they conclude that there’s something wrong her that needs to be cured. She too feels as if she’s “not normal”, and is pressured by a society in which it’s still marriage and children that are the benchmarks of social success for a woman.

That’s one reason she bonds so easily with Takeru (Kanichiro), the lawyer who handled the probate for her estranged late mother’s estate which Kaori declined to inherit. Takeru tells her that he has something he wants to reject too, and it’s true enough that, to begin with, Kaori may be trying to reject her asexuality. She tries to initiate sex with Takeru in order to overcome it, but it isn’t something that either of them can go through with. Though he tells her that he has someone he can’t forget much as he’d like to, Takeru does not disclose that he is gay because of the intense shame he feels about his sexuality. Kaori evidently had a difficult childhood with a mother who was physically abusive towards her and thereafter raised in foster homes, while Takeru’s conservative mother (Mariko Tsutsui) seems to have instilled in him the same anxieties that plague Kaori in expecting him to marry and have children. Takeru’s former lover, Shingo (film director Ryutaro Nakagawa), has married a woman he doesn’t seem to like for convenience’s sake. Ten years after he and Takeru parted, Shingo is now a successful novelist writing populist fare that he secretly hates himself for knowing he’s writing for others and not himself. 

They all, in their way, attempt bury their true selves to achieve social success through heteronormative marriages, but Takeru and Kaori slowly discover that whatever joy they may have found in their mutual decision to overcome their self-loathing in a platonic union, it won’t work. They each at different times end up in the same hotel room with a hookup date staring a black mark on a wall that comes to represent an internal void. Realising that he will not be able to reject his homosexuality nor get over the grief and sense of loss he feels in Shingo’s rejection, Takeru eventually takes his own life. Struggling to understand why, Kaori ends up on a strange road trip with Shingo in which it’s never quite clear whether she fully realises he is Takeru’s former lover, or has already figured everything out and is trying to help him accept himself as a means of atoning for being unable to help Takeru do the same.

Her trip also strangely brings her into contact with a woman from her office who once claimed to hate her, but has now come to apologise while also looking, like Kaori, for some kind of acceptance and recognition. She says that she too hates herself, sure that men are only ever interested in sex and never in her. Eventually making a pass at Kaori, she admits that for some reason she is only able to be honest with her rather than her friends, family, or lovers. Nevertheless, though Kaori rejects her romantic advances, this simple act of unburdening and watching the sunrise together in silence seems to clear the air and grant both women a kind of peace.

Besides her sexual identity, Kaori seems to have a degree of trouble in dealing with people that suggests neurodivergence, but also longs for acceptance and companionship. While processing Takeru’s death and leading Shingo towards an acceptance of himself, she too learns to embrace her authentic identity and refuses to hide or run away from who she really is to please others rather than herself. Holding a mirror up to a repressed society, she achieves a kind of freedom in self-acceptance, which she then begins to extend to Shingo who once admitted that he ran away from love out of fear, and only now has the courage to face himself and the terrible delayed grief of having lost something precious that can never be reclaimed.

The Deepest Space in Us screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

Trailer (English subtitles)